no servant of free enterprise

good news! god's shitty car fleet and shallow faith.

2009-09-17T22:08:00.001-07:00

so it's official. i am a resident of canada until 2011. today i went to the border at sumas. there are all sorts of funny rules about border stuff. one of them is not to be funny. i had one friend who, when asked if he was bringing weapons into the country, said "just these guns" and held up his arms. the border agent was not amused, and said humorlessly, "pull your car over and come on in." they proceeded to interrogate him and his wife for almost 2 hours.

another funny rule about the borders is the sudden change that happens when you exit one building and go into the next. one second, you're in canadian jurisdiction. the next, it's american. anyways, along those lines, when i went to apply for my canadian work visa, i was told that i had to actually walk over to the american building and walk back so that i would be entering canada and then applying. i could not apply unless i was coming in.

anyhow, despite walking to the american side and returning, they told me i didn't have the correct documents to apply and that i needed something called a labor market opinion. unfortunately, that would take weeks, and i needed the visa asap!

i called jill and she, being the wonderful woman she is, scoured the canadian immigration website, and found that i could apply for what's called an open visa (because of her job). so we went down to the border again TONIGHT and got it without a hitch. in the end, it was a better and less restricted work visa. that's good news.

it was also a good reminder that just when i thought my life was going well, little things can throw a big snag into it. and the lesson i learned (and quickly forgot) when our camry was giving us trouble on the road west was "the car doesn't get you there. God does." (to which i'd often add the refrain, "it's a bummer God keeps such shitty cars, though.")

so today while there was a big snag looming, i happened to be listening to david bazan's new album, curse your branches. i've been a fan of bazan's christian/sad bastard act, but his new album marks a definitive break. some have even called it his "break up" album with God. (the title curse your branches should have given that away). i was inclined today to agree with bazan: "all the fallen leaves should curse their branches." but then things ended up working out.

it makes it seem as though i have a shallow faith, to sway so much at the shadow of trouble. reminds me of that verse (oh yea, that verse...) from james about men who doubt being like ships driven around by the waves. men who doubt are unstable.

so, in honor of doubt, and david bazan, i'm going to try and blog what i envision to be a three part review of his album. we'll see how it turns out. could be terrible.

p.s. one last thing: vonage in canada is the bomb. we have an american virtual number, so all our american friends can ring us...and we have a canadian number so our canadian friends can ring us as well. huzzah!

connoisseur of style (manuals)

2009-09-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

as i settle into my new life in langley, bc, i am re-entering a place i haven't been in a while: the academic world of patrick henry college. by that i mean that i'm mostly returning to the basic lessons i learned there and applying them as i begin to teach foreign students who aspire to attend north american graduate schoo l. in my usual cavalier style, i have dismissed most of the stuff handed to me and insisted on reinventing the wheel. instead of looking to one textbook, i am culling through all the collective manuals i have consulted in the past, like strunk & white and my old rhetoric book. i am also taking lessons from other style manuals that are new to me, such as joseph williams's book.

this is not to say that for the last several years i haven't ever consulted the trusty old elements of style, or that the lessons taught to me were forgotten and left unapplied. indeed, dr. smith's rhetoric class was one of the best classes on how-to-BS that i've ever taken (it also taught me about substance, fyi). but i am consulting them more often as i attempt to go about teaching writing myself. it is true, what they say about teaching. you never learn it better than when you teach. this summer, for example, i taught a philosophy class and finally acquired an actual affinity for aristotle that i had been pretending to have for years. going back through these style manuals has really turned me into a beast of style. whether it's a good or bad beast remains yet to be seen.

on a separate note, i wonder what mrs. bergel, my 11th grade english teacher, would say if she knew i were teaching writing. she would probably be proud (and confused). though in truth, my ability to write really has nothing to do with her. in fact, she almost turned me away from writing with her withering red slashes. she was one of those frustrating teachers who would destroy my papers on account of poor writing but never offer a helping hand. now that i think about it, i don't think i ever had a teacher lend a helping hand. i just learned at some point, i guess? i remember my 12th grade teacher enjoyed my writing much more, and i felt empowered. but i don't think i really got a handle on writing until somebody handed me a copy of strunk & white. or rather, made me buy a copy. so perhaps i should thank dr. smith. he had the same withering red pen (i once watched him grade a stack of complex bibliography exercises without ever consulting a manual himself; the man was a certifiable genius), but at least he gave me the tools to correct it myself.

incidentally, i would like to say that having gone through several other style manuals, i still believe strunk & white is perfectly useful. anyone who doesn't take a style manual with a grain of salt should have their head examined. yeah, strunk & white can seem a little bossy at times, but so can the people who excoriate it so viciously.

EDIT: for all you wonderful people who are reading this (none, i suspect), don't take this post as an opportunity to write nasty comments on my style and grammar. it's a blog for strunk's sake!

is billy collins killing poetry? and the poetic line

2009-06-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

over at first thoughts and siris they're having a small informal symposium on a question that essentially boiled down to this: is billy collins writing slam poetry for the upper middle class? you can say what you will about billy collins, whether you think he's killing poetry or not. i believe poetry has a pretty high tolerance level for bad writing (it's been happening for years), and if billy collins is the end of poetry as we know it, it would certainly not be for the reason that he is writing slam poetry for yuppies.

i cannot, however, let the post by the blogger at siris go by without response. he urged us to consider the collins poem 'another reason:

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
You could take the same thing and write it all together with no change, and it would be part of an essay, or of a novel, or of a letter home:
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking. He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark that he barks every time they leave the house. They must switch him on on their way out.
And you will have lost nothing. It is a poem, in the most basic sense that it is crafted language for the sake of the language, but the differences between Billy Collins and (say) Garrison Keillor, setting aside topics, are entirely incidental.

he is actually making this point along the way to his inverse point, that scattering whatever random sentences you find around a page does not necessarily make it poetry (an advertiser could do this, he says), but the fact remains that changing these lines does change this poem fundamentally. siris mistakenly thinks that because a poem is endstopped at normal breath points, therefore it would be the same were it in paragraph format. this is simply not true. all that an endstopped breath means is that the poet wanted the momentum of the line to end there, and not carry on into the next line. to say that collins in a paragraph form is the exact same neglects completely the possible elements of tone embedded in lineation. and with a poet like collins (or keillor) , it's not a stretch to say that tone is 9/10ths of the poem. for a helpful essay on tone, check out real sofistikashun by tony hoagland

siris also makes what i think is an unhelpful distinction between verse and poetry. i suppose it's helpful if you want to have a term that refers only to a relatively strict formal aesthetic, but this seems based more on a bias towards aesthetic rather than helpful distinction. especially when you consider the fact that someone who would fall under siris's category of "poetry" but not "verse" would be robert lowell. if you look at lowell's most famous poems, however, it would not be hard to turn them into his definition of "turns and returns of language":

Thirsting for
the hierarchie privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

becomes:

Thirsting for the hierarchie privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall.

you can see that lowell does indeed have a very simple rhyme scheme at work here, but he has chosen to deliberately lineate this poem differently.

poetry, is not only, as he concludes, "the craft of making excellent language" (and therefore great prose can be effective in the same way that a poem is ultimately). there is a deliberateness in poetry that does not exist in prose. a writer of prose does not intend to do anything except write in paragraphs. a poet, however, always has the options of writing in more than just a paragraph. therefore, the decision to write in lines or paragraphs, or in hypertext even, is a deliberate decision (and therefore, indicative of a reason, or at least the potential of a reason).

this is distinguished from ads, however, because an ad is, more or less, limited by the page on which it is printed. hence line breaks come from another necessity than the decision of the poet (though such a necessity can sometimes be parallel in reasoning to poetry, as for instance, in the timing and pace of text on an ad). in this sense, form poems are more likely to share a relationship with ads, because their limitation is, in some sense, imposed upon them (though again, by the deliberate choice of the poet). this stands in contrast to free verse, which 'ideally' allows the poem itself to determine its 'form' (the meandering and occasionally anxious timing and rhyme scheme of "Prufrock" being the perfect example of this).

A Whole 'Nother Reason Higher Education is Collapsing...

2009-06-08T07:07:00.001-07:00

From Edge Magazine:

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning", he writes. "There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn."

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

Contrary to Nicholas Carr's proposition that Google is making us stupid, Tapscott counters with the following:

My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They're used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What's more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what's going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

The Collapse of Higher Education?

2009-06-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, I am a sporadic blogger. I will post incessantly for a week, and then nothing at all. It is all related to my level of down time, in which I am able to just be lazy and ponder possibilities. As we speak, despite my insane amounts of work to do, I am doing a bit of self-imposed laziness. It's good for the soul. Tomorrow, though, I hit the books hard.

In the meantime, you may have noticed (if you follow my Google Reader share feed) that I've been posting articles about the collapse of higher education...or at least one . This particular article notes a series of disturbing trends that anyone who has ever been involved in higher education over the past few years will have noticed:

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care.

I'm all about working hard to pay for your education. I'm all about waiting tables, being a teaching assistant, working construction during the summer. But those are pretty bad figures...tuition and fees at four times the rate of inflation and twice the rate of medical care?? That's just insane, my friends. Nothing can sustain those sorts of increases.

I suppose I could just say, let the markets decide, but we all know it is the trend of the government to prop up failing institutions, especially those deemed "too big to fail." So what is the college's options? Fail...OR expand at such an exponential rate, push through students during the sugar rush of false growth, that by the time the numbers don't add up, you've become too big to fail, hired too many people to fire without serious consequence, given out too many degrees that may become worthless. Conspiracy theories beside, I don't think I have to argue you into the belief that the consistency of these degrees would have been worthless long before the institution backing them failed. But degrees have become such a commodity, to not have one would render you useless to society, apparently.

This is not to say that I did not benefit from higher education. Indeed, I did. I received public funding as well (it really wouldn't have been possible otherwise these days). But there is no doubt in my mind that our current education system, given the title "bedrock of democracy," have come to mirror our own federal government: bloated, disconnected, and vacuous. Yet I am told, there is no other way! And education must continue! What would we become without education?? So, I read this with interest:

You probably haven't heard of the Ukrainian Catholic University - but I suspect that is going to change. For this wonderful institution offers a philosophy of teaching in radical contrast to the moribund model of Catholic further education found in this country and much of the West.
"You must look into this place," my (Anglican) friend Edward Lucas, author and Eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist, told me. "It's quite amazing." And it is. This university, run on a shoestring, teaches not only the liberal arts and trains Eastern-rite Catholic priests, but also places a community of mentally and physically handicapped people at the centre of its spiritual and social life.

Issues of affiliation aside, I suspect there is a passion at the center of this university that makes it a wholly different sort of place than our modern academy, which has, as Paglia has pointed out over and over again, become a four year booze-fueled, sex-infused resort town funded by mom and dad.

What has changed our current education system. I don't think I've ever been in a class (grade school to my masters) where I did not have a teacher or professor NOT complain about funding. Don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that most of the money that should go to the teachers and programs, gets sidelined into other 'ventures.' But just from this short description, I sense a passion for learning (and the scopes to which learning should reach, that is, compassion) that I desperately wish had been present in my undergrad. Again, this is not to say I did not have a good experience in undergrad or grad school. I felt like I had a better lot than most. But I know my experience is a rarity.

OK, so what this boils down to is my feelings on what should drive higher education, and I'll just state it outright. We have made higher education too education focused! This might seem to contradict what I've said. But the ancients used to consider education a sort of soul-formation. Until we come to understand the place of education in the scope of the rest of society, it will become bloated by self-righteousness and then later collapse in a heap of irrelevant drivel.

Socrates would have said it better, I know.

Psalm 1

2009-05-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

Blest is the man
who doesn't sit, stand, or walk
with fast talkers.
Blest also
is the man who doesn't
shit in his own bed or stand
under the coconut tree he rattles.

Blessed even more
is the man
who doesn't shake for coconuts
when there are none.

Remember:
You are like that tree.
You have a season.
Patience is a virtue.

But God is not
like us lowly sod, man.
He instead is the gardener
and His garden grows
at His command.

Off!

2009-05-25T07:39:00.001-07:00

To seattle/vancouver. I think i have flown more in the last year than most of my life combined.

on my own opinion

2009-05-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

i learned the hard way last november how your opinion can get you into trouble. or more accurately, being too concerned with your own opinion. that is, letting other people know what you think all the time. it's a problem pretty much as old as humankind itself. and i struggle with it.

the problem last november is that there were so many opinions swirling, and it was so easy to get caught up in the mania of the election and forget that, hey, we go through this every four years, and despite the fact that our society may actually be slowly disintigrating, this election alone could not change that.

the hyped sense of urgency is manufactured every few years (in direct relationship to the magnitude of the election) by the parties to try and "get out the vote." ironically, i believe it actually has a lot to do with the way that americans approach (or neglect) elections. everything is do or die, and most people don't like being put into that sort of situation. it's a little like when i would try to diet in the past few years...get myself hyped up to believe that it was now or never. and then when i failed, i despaired. with urgency comes inevitable despair. similarly, most americans either feel an unnecessary urgency and/or despair.

two items managed to capture this almost perfectly:
1. south park's episode on "vote or die" is absolutely perfect when it comes to describing the way that our society approaches voting. when you refuse to vote, you are immediately relegated to the extreme wings of society (where else would you go, right?).
2. the onion captured the perfect post-christmas-esque let down most obama supporters felt after a year solid of obama frenzy.

concerning the problem of my own opinion. to put it simply: i got caught up in the frenzy of urgency and despair. starting up my own google reader feed had a lot to do with this, honestly. the constant stream of information and ideas made it impossible for me to remain evenhanded. any strong opinion (and there were many!) was enough to send me off the deep end.

unfortunately, i had an outlet for this instability: the facebook feed. i was posting articles like crazy. in the end, however, without meaning to, i ended up hurting a very close friend, not so much because of my opinion, but rather because of the insensitivity in which i posted it. it didn't even register to me at first, that i might hurt somebody, but i was so far off the deep end, i'm not too sure anything would have registered.

so now, you might ask, why am i blogging? isn't blogging centered upon the immediate publication (and hopeful exultation) of one's opinion? well...yes. but, let's be honest...blogs are old school. and on the constantly sliding scale of the internet, when compared to twitter and facebook feeds, blogs are the place of disciplined opinion. that's the problem with twitter, on a more fundamental level--it's unbridled opinion without discipline. or at least, being a new medium, it invites that lack of discipline. nowadays, it's the blogs that finally have come into their own as opinion that is finally coming under the reign of self-control. all those who were completely unbridled have left blogs for twitter. let's face it, when my old agrarian leaning prof, mark mitchell, is blogging, something has come to the blogosphere that is worth holding onto.

and so, it is with this in mind that i plan on blogging in such a way that is disciplined in opinion, in hopes that i actually have something interesting to say.

oh, and i thought of a catchy new phrase to describe this blog....punctuation, without capitalization. like?

academia and the art of motorcycle repair

2009-05-24T18:33:00.000-07:00

my lovely fiance passed along a great article to me from nytimes magazine about work with your hands, by matthew crawford, a PHD graduate from chicago (and postdoc fellow for the committee on social thought) who now works in a motorcycle repair shop.

one of his starting points is the dismantling of shop classes in the 90s:

educators prepared students to become "knowledge workers." the imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.

i remember this dismantling. by the time i took "tech ed" at my school, the equipment had become run down (not to mention out of date), and the teachers were demoralized to the point of idiocy. tech ed had become a required anacronism in our scheduling. crawford continues:

when we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. we idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice foro thers their work may ential....but what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it?

crawford continues with some very interesting anecdotes about the work he's done actually using his degrees, and as you might expect, how unfulfilling it was, even denigrating. our attitude that we might be able to "take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy" seems to have wreaked much havoc in this most recent generation. all you have to do is watch a few middle schoolers send hundreds of texts and hour (seriously), and then wail in literal pain if their parents take their cell phones away to see the damaging sway of information's constant stream.

but the larger point of crawford's is work and economy. what has our economy turned our work into? this, of course, all seems to connect to a wendell berry article i've been reading lately, "racism and the economy." he starts with this same attitude towards work that crawford identifies and ties it to issues our country has been struggling with for years:

the root of our racial problem in america is not racism. the root is in our inordinate desire to be superior--not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people--but to our condition. we wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything--of ourselves, each other, or our country. we did not enslave african blacks because they were black, but because their labor promised to free us of the obligations of stewardship, and because they were unable to prevent us from enslaving htem. they were economically valuable and militarily weak.

it makes a lot of sense to me that racism could be our quickest excuse out of history. we think, we are much superior, we believe, because we are not racist. we have solved the essential problem of slavery, which was hatred because somebody looked different. yet we have progressed beyond that irrational contempt, we have moved forward and will continue to move forward.

but what if berry's right, that there is something more fundamental at stake, something that is still motivating us, something, indeed, that motivates our very idea of progress? is it possible that the issue berry identifies is responsible for both slavery and affirmative action? berry says so:

the problem of race, nevertheless, is generally treated as if it could be solved merely by recruiting more blacks and other racial minorities into colleges and then into high-paying jobs. this is to assume, simply, that we can solve the problems of racial minorities by elevating them to full partnership in the problems of the racial majority. we assume that when a young black person acquires a degree, puts on a suit, and achieves a sit-down job with a corporation, the problem is to that exten solved. the larger, graver, more dangerous problem, however, is that we have thought of no better way of solving the race problem.

i forget who it was that said something to the effect of to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society is no virtue. the problem is not a race problem, berry says, or even an economic one, but a moral and spiritual problem. we have not actually solved the problem of slavery, we only got a better slave: technology, powered by oil (or some future magical boundless green energy). we live in a society that seeks to escape what is aptly summed up in the curse of genesis:

so the Lord God said,...to the woman, "you will bear children with intense pain and suffering. and though your desire will be for your husband, he will be your master." and to adam He said "because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit i told you not to eat, i have placed a curse on the ground. all your life you will sturggle to scratch a living form it. it will grow throns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. all your life you will sweat to produce food, until your dying day. then you will return ot the ground from which you came. for you were made from dust, and to the dust you will return."

you don't have to be a fundamentalist christian to see the whole of human history and struggle encased in that statement. foretold there is the last 200 years: slavery, energy dependency, patriarchy and the feminist movement, communism, its fall, out of control markets. scary.

The view from san pedro

2009-05-24T15:56:00.001-07:00

Amazing if my crappy cell camera managed to get it.

Two blog posts coming your way when my lappy gets some yummy bandwith to gobble.

The dharma initiative

2009-05-22T16:35:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or does every housing development in southern california look like the dharma initiative? Squat, yellow huts encased by perpetually manicured landscaping... My (soon to be) sister-in-law pointed it out to me and now i see it everywhere.

on capitalization; on vers libre, ritual, and the jazzy stylings of christ.

2009-05-22T16:12:00.001-07:00

1. some of you might notice that sometimes i capitalize my entries. and sometimes i don't. if they are capitalized, there's a good chance it's coming from my phone, which automatically capitalizes text (and is too much trouble to fiddle with for the sake of consistency). sorry for those who hate my all undercase drivel. but not really cause i'm not going to change.

2. onto other things. in my research for ed hirsch i come across some really good stuff from time to time worth sharing. from an excellent essay (so far) by david antin called "modernism and postmodernism: approaching the present in american poetry" (a boring name, i know--why can't they come up with something a little more flashy...like, "castrating the turkey: on POMO and poetry"?)...he begins with a quote from john crowe ransom:

"i think meters confer upon the delivery of poetry the sense of a ritualistic occasion. when a ritual develops it consists in the enactment, or the recital over and over again, of some experience which is obsessive for us, yet intangible and hard to express. the nearest analogue to the reading of poetry according to the meters, as i think, is the reading of an ecclesiastical service by the congregation. both the genius of poetry and the genius of the religious establishment work against the same difficulty, which is the registration of what is inexpressible, or metaphysical. the religious occasion is a very formal one, with its appointed place in the visible temple, and the community of worshippers congregated visibly."

ok, stop. this is old ground, i know, for most poetry people--poetry attempting to express the ineffable through structures (rhyme) that imitate other things we use (the liturgy) to express the ineffable, etc etc etc. what is cool is the way antin turns it backwards...

you don't have to be especially committed to ritual or religion to observe that this is a kind of poetical episcopalianism. the sermon on the mount was also a religious occasion; it didn't take place in a 'visible temple' and wasn't delivered in meter. but if the meaning of meter for ransom is amiable and nostalgic, that is a triumph of personality. for eliot and for tate, as for their last disciple, lowell, the loss of meter is equivalent to the loss of a whole moral order. it is a 'domino theory' of culture--first meter, then latin composition, then in'ja. this persistent tendency to project any feature from any plane of human experience ont a single moral axis is an underlying characteristic of the particular brand of 'modernism' developed by eliot, tate and brooks.

ouch. of course, what antin neglects here is the fact that christ, in the sermon on the mount, is in many ways building upon the religious structures of the day. not only the law he is building, but his parable style was common for rabbis in his day. he was using structures with which his listeners were quite familiar.

nonetheless, he makes a good point that there is also a sort of jazzy freestyle to the teaching of christ. actually, the teaching style of that day was freestyle. they used midrash, a somewhat obsessive retelling of the same stories over and over, to both teach and meditate upon issues in a story, to replay the emotional journey (one question about midrash: what is up for grabs in a story? can you actually change the narrative?).

as for the question of poetry, what is up for grabs? one thing i have learned in the last year or two is that structure can actually be quite freeing. when you are writing completely unstructured free verse, there is a sense in which you have to juggle more things. contrary to what most people think, there is music in free verse. it is just not determined by meter, rhyme, form, etc.

one problem i find though, when i write free verse, is that it's easy to mistake the overflow of emotion in which we poets often write, as the topic of the poem. when in reality, it's usually something quite different (also contrary to what people think, poets--indeed, most artists--very rarely control the topic of their art). what structure (form, meter, rhyme) allows you to do is put down one of the balls you're juggling and focus on what really matters.

structure is also a way of interrogating your own art. by giving you a limit, something to overcome, you are able to focus on what "truly" matters in your moment of writing (unless what truly matters is lack of structure). you have to decide what is essential. the line you wanted to write originally doesn't fit with the rhyme scheme? well, you then have to ask yourself: "is this line really important?" if it is, then leave it, and it will stick out probably (but hey, it's important right? so let it stick out). but if it's really not important, or if there's a better way to say it, then try that.

structure is also a great way to generate material. in freshman rhetoric class, we learned about the many different rhetorical "topics." these were things you could talk about about no matter what the issue at stake was. (by the way, i recommend that any college freshman take a good classical rhetoric class as a learn to effectively BS their way through most of college.) in the same way, poetic structures function like these rhetorical "topics." no matter what you're writing about, if you're writing a sonnet, you know at a certain point you have to insert a volta (a turn). you have a certain number of lines to make your case in, and then a certain number of lines to turn that case upon its head in a way that makes your reader want to read more.

not only this, you can more consciously decide to break the rules. when you write in free verse, you are always breaking the rules...or creating your own. so you cannot deviate or change the game in the middle of the poem. in this sense, you are a slave to what you set out to do in the very first place or else you risk writing some very confusing poetry (which is often confused in modern poetry for being good).

one last point: any good practitioner of free verse will tell you that the real reason they practice free verse is that they want the topic of their poetry to determine the structure, that structure arises from the topic. the fact remains though, at the end of the day, none of us are really creative enough to come up with a vital structure that matches the complexity of our topic. truly great structures typically come from many people practicing them over years and refining them.

it's like a good recipe. the first cookie was probably a mistake. somebody was probably making a muffin and screwed up and i bet it tasted like crap. but they liked the idea of this flat thing and began refining it. originality is very rarely a virtuoso genius that creates something entirely new and perfect at the same time.

in the same way, when left to their own devices, most writers create something that is exactly alike to another free verse poem. or they start imitating another free verse writer they like (hm...the creation of a new "structure"?). i once heard an example given about the inherent limitations of free verse that seems apt...if you tell a bunch of grade schoolers to write a free verse poem, all the poems come out sounding the same. but if you tell them all to write sonnets, you end up getting a wide variation of unique and interesting poems. of course, the problem with this is that if you write bad poetry in form (especially rhyming form) it sounds trite in addition to being bad.

maybe that's the test, then. if you write bad poetry in form, maybe you should stay away from form totally. (aside: ginsberg apparently was terrible in form, but great in free verse. the exception that proves the rule?)

First clammy steps

2009-05-21T14:05:00.001-07:00

Into the Pacific!

California, California

2009-05-21T11:39:00.001-07:00

In the sunny land of hot dog sticks for a few days to see my brother graduate from seminary. Bummer you can't actually see the mountains for the smog. I had to cough up a good bit of smog induced lung butter upon arrival. Yum.

meanwhile across the street

2009-05-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

from the greyhound, amera's cup o soup cafe is getting a facelift. this guy has is a tenacious little stinker. when i first moved in there was a place called "the jamaican yardspot" that was only open sporadically (though the food was pretty good). then suddenly, in the middle of the night (literally), i see a giant moving van outside and they're all moving like the dickens. the next day, i walk in and there's an egyptian fellow making soup. i come in, say hello, ask what happened.

the yardspot was closing down anyhow, and he was moving in after, he told me. apparently, though, they took off with a lot of his equipment, which he had moved in ahead of time. this doesn't stop the guy...he begins to remodel, while selling food! pretty good food too. over the last few months, bit by bit, he's been investing in this place. it's in a good spot too. when they're done tearing down the greyhound, they're gonig to build the binghamton intermodal transit terminal, and my guess is that if he can survive until that point, he'll do pretty well with all the traffic going through this formerly dead intersection of binghamton.

oh, and one last thing...apparently his wife drained 10k out of their accounts and kicked him out? i don't know if i blame her, though...this guy's a workaholic.

on suddenly feeling like blogging again...

2009-05-20T07:11:00.001-07:00

so, i have pretty much not blogged since...a long while. and i mean blogged for real. i don't know if i ever did it, in fact. i used to post poetry and depression on my xanga, but i hardly do even that anymore. for years i preferred xanga because they didn't screw up the formatting of my poetry. but it seems as though blogger may have resolved some of its issues.

it's not that i've given up on xanga...ok, i have. it's just depressing being over there! i resisted blogger for many years, but it seems now that i have finally succumbed. but not before meeting my (future) wife on xanga first! (yea, lame, i know.)

so sue me. i've changed blogs now...no more twilight kingdom. it was too depressing and existential and freshman year in collegey anyhow.

but the fact is, i haven't blogged anywhere really for a long time, and suddenly i feel like doing it. probably because i suddenly have more time on my hands, having finally finished a long 2 years of schooling.

i can't promise that if i get busy again i won't drop this...or that i won't get bored...or hell, that i won't change blog sites (xanga also suddenly became and eyesore and confusing to use and blogger's all integrated with google products, and it was just so tempting, i couldn't help myself anymore). but so help me God, blogger, if you do the same i will drop you like an ugly prom date.

and in fact, i'm probably already outdated...everybody's got their twitters and their facebook notes, and some of my old favorite friend blogs have closed down (RIP roox ampe). i'm really going oldschool here kickstarting my blog again, but hey--i'm contrarian, no servant of free enterprise.

goodbye greyhound

2009-05-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

i have to admit right up front my bitter relationship with greyhound. after 2 years of riding with them, they never told me about their frequent rider program until the end of my stint, by which point it was too late and i couldn't actually benefit from it in any real way.

also, after 2 years of riding greyhound, by the end they finally got nice new buses and started running them to nyc all the time. free wifi, more legroom. and i'm like, wtf mate? you couldn't do this 2 years ago?

but now i'm feeling all nostalgic. they're tearing down the greyhound of my youth! and i'm watching it all happen through my window.

it's also been exciting, of course. watching them demolish the building is exhilarating. except for the fact that i've missed every major wall come down. i waited all yesterday for one side to come down, and they finally took it down this morning when i happened to be not looking out my window. and then, in the midst of this very blog post, i took a bathroom break to come back and find that yes, indeed, another wall had come down. needless to say i was pissed.

but it also made me think of rod serling. one of the prides of bingo-town is the fact that the creator of the twilight zone came from binghamton. most people don't recognize that binghamton actually is the real twilight zone. any of you who've ever come here will know that.

the beer is cheap, though, so i stick around.

inspired, however, as i was by the tearing down of the greyhound, i began watching old episodes of the twilight zone, mainly the one set in the binghamton (or near binghamton--ithaca?) station. it's worth a looksee.

one last thing before i show you the video...i've noticed construction workers (or at least the crane operators) have a complex sign language they use to communicate with each other over the roar of the machinery. who knew?

Watch 21. The Twilight Zone - Mirror Image in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Psalm 131

2009-05-18T15:12:00.001-07:00

My heart is not proud,
I swear, my eyes
have never scoured
another soul because
I was unhappy
myself. I try not
to know more than I
need to know but

instead I try to be like
a man with a camera
who expects
the picture to happen before
his eyes. I told
my soul be patient
I told my soul
wait for the right light

and then the photo of the Lord
coming would be a good one.

Aubade on a Sunday

2009-05-18T14:55:00.001-07:00

Why wait until the doldrums of the coming afternoon
even make our socks seem heavy?

The sun rises and comes and saps the tree branches
of their breeze

anyhow, and soon we'll be sapped too
and what will it matter then,

what will it matter,
all the glorious thundering we make while

the morning clouds rise up
from the ground, like an offering to the sky?

Why bother with the forceful blink
into the Chinese fingertrap of day?

Let's go ahead and just admit we're
useless. Let's rise to fall again so that we rise.

Not There

2009-05-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes at dusk

I drive a car

nobody knows I own

on a road nobody knows I drive.

(You can imagine my horror

when I see some body else

I know driving a car I don't

on the same road.

Usually I hide behind

the wheel and they're so busy

looking forward

they don't notice me.)

I look into the houses I drive by

with the lights on

in their sad

and perfect inscrutability, damp beams

through brown

lampshade blinds.

I insert my face on

the fireplace mantle,

that odd shelf, my face

into the pictures of the family,

play fetch with their old and

neglected dog,

eat the leftovers.

Nobody notices when I close the window

to the summer rain

or crack the moon open

and pour out the glass inside

(that's why it shines),

nobody says thank you

when I take out the trash, it's like

I'm not even there.

Fall and all

2008-10-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

The view from my window.

2008-10-25T14:36:00.001-07:00

A rainy saturday.

Moby-dick

2008-09-13T18:48:00.001-07:00

Waist deep

2008-09-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

spiediefest

2008-08-02T15:44:00.001-07:00

Balloon rally

Big 'ol beard

2008-07-25T16:20:00.002-07:00

Last night

2008-07-25T16:20:00.001-07:00

St. paul

2008-07-06T17:56:00.001-07:00

unfinished

2008-07-05T07:31:00.000-07:00

Marisia's 3rd floor apt.

2008-06-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

My latest painting

Personal boundaries

2008-02-12T14:34:00.000-08:00

Folsom has none

Ash Wednsday 2

2008-02-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

Ash Wednesday

2008-02-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

From Hunter

unshowered poem

2008-01-24T07:11:00.001-08:00

i was temporarily unwelcome in a few homes
and driving back to binghamton
i was surprised at how quickly it came
and i had not thought of yet
where it was that i could go
and the internet cafe was still closed
and i didn't feel like sitting in church
so i just drove in circles around binghamton
for a while
and blew gas money
before pulling into the parking lot
of the old magic city ice house
beside the river
beside the susquehanna.
i told myself a poetic line
everyone need to be unwelcome
in his own house from time
to time. to be like christ
no place to lay your head.
no toilet to call your own
just a dessert and sand blowing
up your ass, the inconsistency
of toilet paper is probably
the worst feeling
and most disorienting way to live.
to wed the sacred
and profane. to lose
one's mind over and over.
in that parking lot i found
a frozen snowglobe. the contents
held in chaos by the frozen elements.
the glass was cracked in the icy overflow.
i picked it up and kept it
until it melted and the world was gone.p
and then i left to find a place to sleep
for the night.

tasty

2008-01-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

Puree. Mmm...

It's all over now

2008-01-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

Baby blue

The snow lay on the ground

2008-01-22T07:14:00.000-08:00

Several feet really

Aedan in armor

2008-01-21T08:19:00.000-08:00

You can't tell but he's scowling.

Sun light. Red beard.

2008-01-18T11:10:00.001-08:00

Testing, testing.

Pagan Angel

2008-01-18T08:37:00.000-08:00

(this was originally written to go on patrolmag.com, but has yet to appear...we'll see about that. but until then, here it is for you, my loyal blogspot audience...)

A two (or three) part series in which I muse on the Death of the American Idiom in Sodom, South Georgia.

Micah Towery

Part 1

So if Wilco is America's answer to Radiohead, then Sam Beam is America's answer to Bob Dylan. Wait, Bob Dylan's already American. Ok, then, Sam Beam is our generation's answer to Bob Dylan. Not that Bob Dylan needed an answer, or that our generation seeks to rival the hippie generation in any meaningful sense, but the comparison is hard to resist: folkie gone 'lectric, and suddenly Mars Incorporated chocolate company is using Beam (something Dylan only caved to much later in his ironic endorsement of Victoria's Secret) in psychedelic paisley M&M colors. WTF? Beam was supposed to be my own private fantasy, an evocative reminder of my romantic forays as an undergrad. It suddenly became all too clear to me what it was like for Led Zeppelin fans to hear Zep’s music in a car commercial. Suddenly, I felt like my own heart was sold, and I hadn’t even managed to graduate with my Bachelors yet. At least Zeppelin fans got a good 20 or more years to enjoy the music on their own terms—I hadn’t even gotten over that girl yet.

Yet this is our culture today. Before we have a chance to process the events of our lives, companies have somehow slick-wrapped them and are trying to sell them back to us. Beam’s music particularly seems to meet all our needs and deepest commercial desires: romantic, religious, fatalistic. It’s just like Johnny Cash said—the only three things somebody can really write about are love, God, and murder (and don’t forget the tagged-on catchall Life). Everything somehow fits into those three categories. And really, what’s with all that Biblical imagery from Beam, a professed agnostic? In its October cover story, Paste royally botched its chance to answer this question. When they should’ve pressed Beam on his rampant thievery of a system of mythology he doesn’t even buy into, they sit back and mused to themselves, huh, isn’t that interesting?

I had always thought Beam was a Christian, or believer at least on some level, until I read the interview. I was always impressed by what I thought was his deft use of southern culture, particularly the religious icons that populate the desolate landscape of a post-Civil War south. Paste correctly noted that Beam’s musical vocabulary is showing him to be a rival to Jack White (and possibly a willingness to express said vocabulary with greater breadth). It seemed like he really bought into these icons on some level and was using his vocabulary to give voice to those ideas, and that gave me confidence in his songwriting. So what, do I not buy it now? Do I think Sam is an atheist without guts who wants to use loaded imagery without consequence? Maybe. I plan on discussing Beam’s use of Christian imagery in this first part, particularly in comparison to the realm of Christian music. And maybe in that process, I’ll answer my own question. In part two, I plan on justifying Beam’s use of this idiom, and drawing larger conclusions. If I still have more to say (no guarantees either way) I’ll flesh it out in a third (as of yet apocryphal) article. I’ll be building on both Paste’s interview (since I don’t really have the clout to manage an interview with Beam) and Beam’s lyrics.

The fact is that few of Beam’s songs do not mention God or religion in some form, and even songs that don't carry an unspoken religious weight. This is probably because Beam tends to use the same words over and over, continually cashing in on his own recurrent images. God is always a somewhat deistic shape; mothers and fathers are often drunks; there's always beggars, bees, birds, something being borrowed or stolen, and somebody is almost always sleeping. This isn't a bad thing. Whitman spent his whole life continually rewriting the same book, expanding and contracting (more the former than latter). Scorsese has made most of his movies about the same exact people, using the same exact actors, doing the same exact accent. Beam shouldn't be blamed for this. But at least, we say, Scorsese is making movies about people he grew up with on the streets. When was the last time Beam hung out with Jesus the Mexican Boy? Of course Beam has a right to write about these sort of things and use them to his heart's content. And the fact is, I buy them, and then wrestle with them over this sort of question.

Like his use of imagery, Beam’s salesmanship of his own music has been impressive. Initially, he took some self-recorded grainy-chop recordings from his garage and sold them to Sub Pop. He returned with similar studio recorded meditations with his next album and EP, before changing it up and killing all our hopes of complete folk revival with his electric EP. And now, with his latest, he’s even going so far as to channel the Beatles in his pastiche. Beam’s transition has been slow and arguably contemplated. Unlike Dylan’s sudden switch that was intent on confounding everyone who tried to categorize him, Beam’s following, including myself, has largely taken the wait-and-see approach. The question continually looms: what is Sam Beam getting at?

And if we don’t have a clear picture of what exactly Beam is getting at, why do we listen to him in the meantime? I think the simple answer is that we trust Beam. In an era that seems intent on releasing each album as the newest final definition of an artist, Beam seems comfortable taking his time and releasing many of his lesser, more disparate efforts in the form of EPs and singles with little fanfare on iTunes, a medium, which, on some level, I trust for some inexplicable reason (despite knowing I probably shouldn’t). The fact is that Beam himself doesn’t seem totally able to direct his own musings, he can only channel them and record them. And I, for one, have found more religious solace and empathy in Sam Beam's music, than I ever have in the so called "Christian" music that exists today. Beam's music might not contain the theology of "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," but neither does virtually anything produced by the “Christian” market. Actually, Beam's lyrics are more driven by the Bible than those of most Christian artists, who prefer oblique references that they believe cover their inability to write meaningfully about what they believe. This, in part, is why I get so jaded about a magazine like Paste highlighting such an important issue, and then not engaging it at all, letting Beam play it off as process, thinking that the oblique reference is enough to start an errant heart searching for truth.

It says something terrible either about me or about Christian music today that a confessed agnostic tells me more about my faith than the faithful. And what does that say about Beam’s lyricism? Is he really an agnostic? Beam’s music demonstrates one thing clearly—great art is not rigged. Beam says he wrote much of The Shepherd’s Dog out of some disillusionment with the current politics of America. But one doesn’t listen to this album and come away screaming profanities about George W. Bush. Nor does somebody come away agnostic. Any good artist must realize that art transcends its own inspiration, that it is greater than the sum of its parts. So because Beam seems to express a genuine interest in faith at times (in a truly meaningful way, as opposed to CCM-approved expressions of “faith”) does not cancel his agnosticism. In fact, it gives breadth to it, the same way Derrida’s admission of constant prayer and his acknowledgement that belief and disbelief are on the same continuum gave him an authority he did not have before. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to hear that CCM has actually led people away from faith following the basic syllogism: if these people consider themselves of God, and God is the definition of beauty according to them, then why is this so ugly? Most CCM is, at best, self-contradictory. At worst, it’s offensive and gives non-Christians a very good reason to mock Christian “culture.”

So what is it in Iron & Wine’s music I find so entrancing? Well, when Christ does come back, I do think there’s a very good chance he might find me at a poker game, burning the midnight oil with a pint of Guinness and fifty bucks on the line. Or maybe it’s the fact that Beam’s own agnosticism seems to express the trepidation with which I approach my own beliefs. This is not to say that I don’t hold my beliefs with conviction. The opposite in fact, my own beliefs inspire trepidation. The fact is that it scares me when Rich Mullins turns on the smoke machines in “Awesome God” and sings about the absolute power of God. God’s justice is always a double edged sword. As Paul makes clear in his epistles, the law only serves to show how dead we are. The law is an object of wrath. And God’s absolute power in contrast to my absolute deadness is a scary thought. There is no escape. It’s this very tension that Beam calls forth in his song “Sodom, South Georgia.” In it, a father is dying, a child is being born, and the whole town is couched in bizarre (but stunningly clear and even coherent) imagery. Even still “all dead white boys say [and “white tongues hang out”], ‘God is good.’” This particular chorus rings out the seeming cognitive dissonance of the Christian faith (and the sometimes bitter lack of understanding even its adherents have to it): that God is good despite his agency (even if indirect) in pain and death. There are echoes of Sufjan’s God-monster from “Casimir Pulaski Day” here. Belief in the Christian God comes at a bitter price: the acknowledgement that we must simply nod our heads at the pain of the world, and even still, acknowledge God’s role in it (if only by his existence as a just being). It’s something Beam understands better than most Christian ministers, and obviously, it’s its own reason for Beam’s agnosticism. Really, who wants to believe in this? Beam seems to be asking. It’s a damn good question.

Forget what I said about “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” Beam is dealing in some harsh theology here. Consider what St. Paul said in Galatians, chapter 3 (vs. 21-22): For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law. But the Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe. Beam acknowledges (at least metaphorically) that Jesus is coming back, and that, in some sense, He will save us. But where does Christ find us? At a poker game, of course. If anything, the reasons for not believing in Beam’s music are the Christians themselves. How many CCM songs are there about that? Not too many last time I checked. We do have a few sayings we throw around now and then, like “so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good” to gently chide ourselves, but then again, we also throw around phrases like “God is good” without really considering the (earthly) ramifications of it (namely, that are a source of evil). If Christians want to be a city on a hill, particularly in the arts, we need to be the ones who talk about the difficulty of belief, not agnostics. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that—agnostics clearly have a difficulty with belief. Beam is honest enough to dialogue with that which he has difficulty, not marginalize it. Therefore, let me rephrase, Christians need to have the same honesty that Beam has, not simply close our minds to the difficulties, which, whether or not we like it, most Christian music does.

And in closing this first part, I’d like to anticipate a retort I can hear from the wings already: art is also about praise, in addition to reflection. Indeed it is, but part of praise is reflection. One of the loveliest (and most unique in comparison to many writings) things about the Bible is the way it will suddenly break into ecstatic praise for God, whether it is in the midst of a theological discourse in St. Paul, or a reflective psalm by King David. The Bible shifts seamlessly from one genre to another (where do you think Whitman learned to do it so well?). Praise is couched in reflection, and vice versa. They are inseparable. Similarly, Beam (whether he means to or not) does the same thing in his song “Sodom, South Georgia,” a song that encapsulates commentary, reflection, and praise (even if it ironic from Beam’s perspective). This particular point hints at something I’m going to comment on in part two: great art is not rigged. Aren’t you interested? (Say yes.)

+

=

BFF

(incidentally similar appearances?

i think not.)

Bi Cycle

2007-12-19T21:01:00.000-08:00

i. Bilingual

“Modernity begins in Hell.” (Tom Sleigh)

“Everything was clean
So precise and towering
I was welcomed
With open arms
I received so much help in every way” (Jeff Tweedy)

A vision of John, while on Patmos…

I saw a great white throne and the One

who was seated on it. The Earth and Sky

fled His face. No place was found

to cover them. I saw the dead, all

facing the throne. The Books

were thrown open. Another Book

was opened, the Book of Life,

and the dead were judged

by what they had done,

what was written in the book.

The Sea gave up the dead in it.

The Ground released its dead.

The dead in Hades were exiled.

All were judged by the works

of their flesh. Death and Hades

were thrown from the place

of judgment, into the Lake of Fire.

This is the second death.

If anyone’s name was not found

written in the Book of Life,

they too were thrown into

the Lake of Fire.

(Revelations 20:11-15)

ii. Bisexual

A lesbian told me she thought they were

cheating and I agree it doesn’t

seem fair. It does seem excessive, to

be in love with everyone.

But then

what is the poet if not in love

with everyone, too? What is his job

if not being busy overstating his case

and missing the cracks between lines

people slip through, and how the heart can—

will overturn anything

set before it that doesn’t smell sweet

enough, sick languor sweet. The heart,

dammit, the uncontrollable heart.

It has been known from time to time

to tilt the scales in its favor

or simply sweep its hand

across the chessboard, even if

it’s already won—checkmated

itself into submission. The heart has a mind

of its own.

There is a reason

we only measure

the heart’s beating

iii. Bifurcation

About that

uncontrollable heart which doesn’t

balance checkbooks, but does keep

a detailed ledger of wrongs,

though love apparently

keeps no such record—

Sorry to split this discussion in to

two, but I had to use those leftover lines

from Bisexual, the inevitable favorites

that get cut.

We poets steal

then recycle instead of

exiling language

to some place beyond our reach.

And sorry to talk about my process

so blatantly. I’m told

it’s what good writers do,

rub themselves in your face,

but I always thought

it was like a mirror looking at itself

or trying to find

your ass crack, constantly creeping

up your own back.

Incidentally,

how do we know we have an ass crack?

Have we seen it in that mirror staring back?

Or do we just believe

what others tell us?

iv. Bible

The throne is achromatic and crushing

instead of huge.

Lord, your throne is blinding—

I have given you all I am nothing but

a whole lot of whiskey.

Lord, I’m drunk and lonely beautiful

rolling free cigarettes with dried out tobacco

in New York City it’s December.

Lord, I’m lush on whiskey don’t bother me.

I’m trying to remember.

I’m calling my friends, calling you

I can’t fucking remember your number.

I’m talking to you.

I want to get blitzed and drink whiskey to your holy praises

Lord, I’m writing you like Allen Ginsberg wrote America

I’m imitating it’s the best I can do.

I’m caught here in this tuberculosis shaft.

I’ve got my glass of whiskey sitting

on all my New York city parking tickets.

Lord I drove a truck all summer and I think about it

sometimes how hot it was in that cab

and I think about all the people I saw all the time

and never spoke to, and how I became a slave to them.

I was just a human body all day. Lord, you didn’t make me

to do that.

Lord, you should’ve seen me when I was younger.

I used to find all kinds of reasons to pray to you

I was theological and nobody stopped me.

I was thinking things it took me years to learn later.

Lord, I have sinned with women.

Lord, I have sinned with whiskey.

Lord God, I have stared at nakedness and found your beauty

even in everything you find disgusting. Lord,

You can’t help it.

They warned that this would happen.

You didn’t tell them that, did you?

I knew you didn’t.

Return me to the times, Lord, when I was ugly.

I am not ugly anymore, but I was happy then.

Lord, I still am ugly nothing’s changed.

The dogs have found me now,

The ones I wanted you to set upon those against me

are chasing me. They’re slobbering in my dreams,

Lord, and I wake up with it still sticky on me.

Lord, it’s how I always escape.

I just wake up.

v. Fear of Flying

Caratina Avenue was a bent-shaped horseshoe then—and it still might be

perfect for flying down late at night on sleds

on pavement packed snow.

And late that summer, I was careening

down Caratina's curve, gaining speed on my bike, the buzz of baseball cards,

higher pitched in the spokes.

What I was thinking exactly? driving my bike into a crowd of kids on bikes

at the bottom of the curved hill,

I was going fast, and

I never go fast, I was

a child brave enough to climb up the tree but unable muster the climb back down

and like you probably feared,

someone turned a bike wheel

in my path. I launched

over the handlebars

into space.

I was floating to be sure, but things didn't slow, like you see in the movies—I'm telling you this in slow motion, but it was fast.

I didn't see everyone's mouths agape as I flew by unwitting Superman

but I managed two thoughts in that brief moment: first the pavement, then

Mr. Fiddler—

who in the corner of my eye I saw running, briefcase, suit, and all, from his parked car towards me as I flew— I thought, where has he been

all this time, leaving his desk in the basement

where the neighborhood kids played the Nintendo with Jonathan and Katherine, his kids, until our fingers were raw and eyes watered.

Why was he here now? Did he expect to catch me?

Well he didn't, and the pavement ate my hands and punched my belly

hard, like a suckerpunch I knew was coming.

My mom had warned me about this sort of thing. But Mr. Fiddler picked me up,

picked the rocks out of my hands, didn't ask why

I wasn't more careful.

And maybe you have figured out by now

Mr. and Mrs. Fiddler later split.

Jonathan became a genius. Katherine,

always the tomboy, stopped wearing dresses altogether.

And sometimes it seems to me a genuinely unhappy story,

the way we all lived on Caratina six years

and only saw Mr. Fiddler twice, his desk with the expensive leather chair

sat in the basement like a ghost. And it would be easy

to make this a story about facing things like your wife, or the pavement,

or that tree in the backyard my dad cut down with me still in it, stuck, for a third time,

trying to learn a lesson

but I content myself

to think sometimes, despite my fears,

I flew,

before I fell and how Mr. Fiddler ran and tried to catch me.

And my explanation...

This cycle, in some senses, is irreconcilably disparate, and, in some sense, purposefully so. There is a deliberate lack of unity when it comes to form, and the content is also disparate in many ways. Instead, they connect by a progression, a sort of gesture of poetic motion. There is, of course, the unity based in title: all begin with “bi” (except the last one, which is, implicitly bicycle…am I giving away all my jokes here? I think so.).

Part one begins in Hell, as the Tom Sleigh quote indicates. Most of the great epic poetry insists on sending somebody to hell: Odyssey, Aeneid, Inferno, Paradise Lost, even Pound’s Cantos. This cycle does not purport to be epic poetry, but only rather imitate the poetic motion of those poems, in a sense. It lacks the Catholic imagination of Dante and the dramatic mind of Milton. In many ways it is most similar to Pound rooting his Cantos in the Hell of his own classic tradition. Translated from the original Greek from John’s Revelation, I attempted to speak from the Hell of my own evangelical tradition, the devastatingly plain language of the New Testament. This, of course, is tempered by the Jeff Tweedy epigraph from his song “Hell is Chrome.” Or perhaps not tempered, but contrasted by a modern, non-evangelical view of Hell, which, if you consider the whole of A Ghost is Born resembles a great societal headache in the midst of a commercial utopian society.

Sections two and three are connected explicitly, almost one poem broken in two. Here there is the self-aware playing with form, content, but most explicitly a tone that seeks to bring the reader along. It is a uniting of tone that gives strength to the poetry, I think. It is the voice that can connect disparate elements. This was something I have largely learned largely from Whitman via Ginsberg, who can break down just about every typical element of poetry and build a poem largely on rhetorical strength of tone. This is, perhaps, the reason I shifted towards a complete imitation of Ginsberg by part four. After pulling apart the poetry by the seams in part three, I felt as though there needed to be something that sought to pick up the random pieces and sew them back together. It is, in some sense, a response to the first section in light of the question of poetry posed in section two and three.

The final section is a more experimental prose poem. In many ways, it sticks out as the sorest of all these various thumbs, though it is the ghosted title poem of the whole cycle. It is actually quite mundane in content, despite its more experimental style. The long lines, in some sense are intended to push the ear of the reader as far as possible with rhythm and sound and still keep some integrity of the line. Much of this whole cycle is attempting to push things usually connected as far apart as possible and seeing what is left holding it together. In the same way Rothko saw value in breaking art down to its most basic elements as a way of reaffirming its complex possibilities, I am inversely trying to push these poems to their complex extremes and seeing what basic elements are left. This pushing also allows for a greater range of expression the same way jazz has pushed the European ear for order and expectation (and its ironic bedfellow subversion of expectation), and reaffirmed the integrity of things like the chord and scale, despite its constant challenge to them.

All this said, I think this cycle can be broken down into an attempt to put together largely disparate items and seeing what can possibly be drawn together in them by strength of metaphor and tone. I don’t know, however, if I’ve succeeded.

The Holy Spirit of History and the Mines of Idiom: William Carlos Williams and Stevens—Sufjan, That Is

2007-12-13T20:14:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4-5-6-7

All computers go to heaven
If you think you got the vision,
Put it in the conversation
I rejoice in what I carry in my heart

it overwhelms what a man
Great Emancipation plans,
and public transport, clap your hands, Abraham
Oh religion, superstition,
Man's conditioned mysteries incomplete

~Sufjan Stevens, Dear Mr. Supercomputer

Poetry has always managed to strike a unique balance between autodidacticism and high cultural learning. Modernist poetry in particular has served well as a bridge between high and low culture. The early modernist trifecta—Eliot, Pound, Williams—provides helpful delineating points on the continuum between the two ends of the spectrum. On the high end there is Eliot, trying to reconcile his genius into the long conversation of genius. Somewhere in the middle is Pound with his constant allusion tempered by his continual attempts to “make it new.” And finally, you have Williams on the low end with his emphasis on the American Idiom. This simple arrangement could never really do justice to the complexity of their respective poetics, of course, but it is helpful in orienting them with respect to this question.

William Carlos Williams found this relationship between the common and the poetic embodied in what he called the American Idiom. This concept is present in much of his work, though he never seems to have gone through the trouble of creating an exact definition. This is probably because he spent much of his career attempting to define it, in both his poetry and his prose. One such work is his book of historically themed essays In the American Grain. In it, he muses on the many famous figures in the history of the Americas. This interesting relationship between history and idiom still exists in some art today, namely, in the songwriting of Sufjan Stevens, whose albums Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State and Come On! Feel the Illinoise! (and its companion B-sides album The Avalanche) are tour de forces of the respective state histories and Christian theology. Into these Stevens weaves his own personal history, adding an element to Williams’ conception of idiom that most modernists generally shunned: personality. Sufjan Stevens, in many ways, could be viewed as one of the artists to wear the mantle of the American Idiom into current modern art. In this essay I will first define as much as possible Williams’ idea of the American Idiom from In the American Grain and comment how it works itself out in Williams’ poetry, particularly Spring and All. I will then consider how Williams’ idea of Idiom has fared in modern art, focusing particularly on Sufjan Stevens. I will assert that Williams idea of idiom is increasingly problematic as the speed at which information travels increases and society shifts (via information and commercialism). I will also argue that Sufjan Stevens is, in many ways, the heir to Williams’ American Idiom, appropriating it differently so as to resist the disastrous appropriation of his own art by commercialism, which thus far, has shown itself as a destructive force to the integrity of art.

William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but it appears he had a keen interest in the history of the Americas. His book In the American Grain is a largely poetic retelling of various points in the lives of many great figures who shaped the Americas. Williams vision stretches beyond just typical American history and beyond American borders; he discusses everyone from Montezuma and Red Eric to the Pilgrims to more typical American figures such as Ben Franklin, George Washington, and Sam Houston. It doesn’t seem as though Williams is engaging in an early form of political correctness by his inclusion of typically neglected figures of American history, but rather expressing the magnanimity of his vision of what America really is, and how its idioms are created. It is odder still that Williams would explore history as opposed to language to help construct his idea of what the American Idiom is, but for Williams one must look to plain things for the wisdom that is so definitively American. It is not, however, a form of primitivism. It is a eulogy to the frankness of American history, which he sees as diametrically opposed to an empty European complexity. Consider his essay on Ben Franklin, whom he describes as a great “gyroscope” (153), full of constant motion, but never really going anywhere. He says further:

[Franklin] represents a voluptuousness of omnivorous energy brought to a dead stop by the rock of New World inopportunity. His energy never attained to a penetrant gist; rather it was stopped by and splashed upon the barrier, like a melon. His “good” was scattered about him. This is what he called being “practical.” At such “success” we smile to see Franklin often so puffed up. (153)

It would be easy to think that Williams is criticizing Franklin for some sort of lack of vision. Franklin’s polymathic interests and abilities would have allowed him to go far in the courts of Europe if he had the drive and vision. Yet Franklin was unwilling even to be the president of his new America, much less travel to Europe and ambitiously advance himself (though he did some of this later as a diplomat). Rather, Williams says “the terrible beauty of the New World attracts men to their ruin. Franklin did not care to be ruined—he only wanted to touch” (155). What Williams calls this “terrible beauty” is almost like a siren call in the New World, calling men away from the posh European courts (which arguably ruined men more than the New World ever could) into a generally unexplored land. Their exploits may or may not reach the “civilized world,” but the call to be an adventurer was great. Indeed, this is the tone set by the earliest explorers, a relentless drive to see, to touch, as Williams says. One can see a greatness to these men, their restless gyroscopic nature that can only be satisfied by constant movement, a calling to something higher than the base nature of European court life.

This is how Williams views history, particularly these people of history. They are objects of history that both shape and are shaped by their surroundings. It is the same way idiom functions. Williams knows that idiom rises out of history, and by this idiom Americans are conscious of their own history. Idiom codes history into the language. But he also knows that it is impossible to trace the complete roots of various idioms, and that one must put on the mantle of history to understand it more fully. This is what In the American Grain is ultimately a project about. Williams never purports to speak in the subject’s first person, but he has no problem speaking from an omniscient narrator perspective. It does not matter, of course, whether or not Williams is actually capturing every thought accurately; he realizes in his exploration of history and idiom, he is actually shaping both. He is taking history onto himself, and recreating something new. It inspires him and he writes it, a sort of Holy Spirit of history, not possessing, but rather inspiring and giving him energy and ideas to use in his own voice, his own manner.

Williams’ relationship to history and idiom is almost mystical. Because of these things, Williams does not see himself as writing in a vacuum, as one like Eliot might believe. Nor does he see himself as simply utilizing idiom towards an end, as Pound clearly does. In the American Grain has Williams as both user and victim of history. He comments on it, and in many ways, it comments on him. Consider Williams’ portrait of the Pilgrims, “Voyage of the Mayflower.” He is recounting many of the written words of the Pilgrims, remarking how they seem to view every event as a morality tale of some sort. History, for them, is a morality tale. Then he calls into question these morals, somewhat ironically since he himself is looking to history as an indicator of sorts. He declaims, “as with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds” (67). What Williams has done here, inadvertently or not, is identify the intersection between morality and history. In looking to history, we inevitably seek answers as to why something has happened in the past. In doing so, we are indirectly seeking an answer to our present, as the oft-quoted adage indicates: those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. And yet it is almost impossible to rationally assert current events are meaningfully similar to the past. The factors are too numerous to ever account for. And yet, it is completely natural for humans to look to their past as a legend to the present. It is almost impossible not to think of events in the past as somehow connected and indicative of our present, a moral indicator of what’s to come. Morality, in a great sense, rises out of our history.

Perhaps it seems thus far Williams sees no difference at all between history and idiom. Indeed, in one sense, history is idiom. But idiom goes one step further; it integrates the past into the currency of the present. Thus, when one roots poetry in idiom, as Williams advocates, one is rooting their language in that collective morality of history. For Williams, idiom is a way to guard against the amorality of European high society. Idiom provides a social conscious built right into the language. Williams sees this values system that arises out of history and the currency of the commonplace as essential to a poetics of value. This helps explain his animosity towards Pound’s and particularly Eliot’s poetics are rooted in a tradition that asserts itself over others; it does not arise naturally from history or the common language of the present. In Eliot’s attempts to escape his own personality, he subjects himself to a tradition that runs parallel to history and idiom, the tradition of genius. The tradition of genius could be seen as a sort of meta-history, parallel to Williams’ history, interacting some here, and reacting there, but separate, and purposefully so. It is a history of ideas, as opposed to a more personality focused history. This does not mean that Williams particularly favors personality. Even though it focuses on personalities, these personalities are largely objects in history, to be taken into ones hands, touched, explored, the same way the great explorers and personalities of the Americas did with the world around them.

Similarly Williams’ writing is not particularly personality centered. It is quite focused on objects, and particularly creating objects of the present in his poetry. Consider Williams’ seminal work of poetry Spring and All. Instead of objects of history that take part in the American Idiom, Williams is taking objects from his present, part of his local idiom, which, to some extent, entails much of the American Idiom at large. This objectness is vital to Williams’ understanding of idiom. Though the reasons for this cannot be explicitly understood, it is betrayed by his very approach to language. Consider what is perhaps Williams’ most famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow:”

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Even though this poem is essentially a sentence, each image is carefully isolated by means of juxtaposition. Each stanza contains images that are a juxtaposition within itself according to the line breaks: “depends” versus “upon” (two directional words going in opposite direction), the particulars of the wheel barrow (its redness and wheel[ness]) versus the wheel barrow in its wholeness, the glaze of rain versus the rainwater, the chickens versus their own whiteness. The details of the things are pulled apart and highlighted, bringing out a rich multi-faceted view of each object. Williams’ accomplishment is almost that of the cubists, allowing the reader to see these objects in many different ways, from the different angles of detail. Yet despite this almost excessive juxtaposition, the poem has a unity. It does not communicate the same fractured nature that a painting like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Rather this poem explores the unity of objects, their interconnectedness, while also evoking the particularities of objects and, in some sense, how they vie with one another. What is even more striking about this poem is how commonplace it is. These are objects that many Americans in Williams’ time could see on a regular basis. For Williams to find so much juxtaposition and still unity, to be so common and yet absolutely metaphysical is a feat. More important here, we can see the way he perceives language. Each word is isolated either visually or by juxtaposition in the same way each imagistic object in the poem is isolated. This is one thing Williams does often in his poetry: isolate each word visually, either through an extreme sparseness of form or by simply leaving a word on a line by itself. What would today be considered gimmicky by most MFA students, Williams accomplishes with verve in a way that is not gimmicky in the least. This is because Williams largely helped pioneer this technique, but also because the reader senses the whole power of idiom behind Williams’ language. Its commonality is the source of its power. The idiom arises from the commonplace here. And more importantly, Williams communicates this idiom through objectness.

Williams’ American Idiom is a brilliant way of understanding language in relation to the society that creates it; however, today’s idiom lives in an age of rapid change, driven by the now instantaneous speed of information (plus ability to access it virtually anywhere) and commercialization’s utilization of this speed. Williams’ idea assumes a sort of static in the idiom that lends credence to it, keeps it from foundering with its audience. Today, however, no such state of static exists. The speed of information changes idioms faster than most dictionaries can keep a handle on. This can be especially maddening for poets, as a statement that is full of meaning and true emotion one moment, can, in a very short time be suddenly transformed into the worst cliché or most unsurprising turn of phrase. This can happen particularly fast if something is popular. Many Led Zeppelin fans remember with horror the day that their favorite music was used to sell cars. In many ways they were right to feel the sense of betrayal, that a car company would attempt to capitalize on all the various feelings invoked or associated with such music. Music, perhaps, is the most blatant indicator of the audience at which a commercial is aiming. But today, it is assumed almost, that if something is artistically popular, whether it is a style of clothing, piece of music, or catch phrase, a company will pick up on it quickly and appropriate it for sales. Thus, there is a sense of irony which any socially conscious artist feels today about the raw materials of their craft. In one sense, it is impossible to resist this commercialization, for if something is popular, even if the artist refuses to release the rights to it, a sufficient imitation will almost inevitably be created and used in place of the desired work. The theft of work today is inevitable, so artists must create art that is difficult to steal if they want some sense of lasting impression on their labor, something that is almost impossible to replicate, or will at least stave off replication and appropriation as long as possible.

Ironically, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed albums of 2006, Sufjan Steven’s Come On! Feel the Illinoise!, manages to accomplish this very feat. It has appeared in popular movies, commercials, and been discussed widely, and yet still manages to retain a freshness with every listen, which seems to reproach the listener for feeling as though they have a grasp on it. Good art, of course, has done this for centuries. But much good art has also withered under the bossy eye of commercialism. In many ways, one could say that the current world has decreased the half-life of much art that would have lasted much longer. But then, most artists have never had the opportunity to respond to the decreased half-life of their own work. Most artists have not faced such a quick death for their art. Much art, of course, has always faced high stakes. The art of marginalized or oppressed people has been under this duress for centuries. Yet there is a different pitch to this current challenge. First, everyone is subject to the relatively blind eye of commercialism (money truly seems to be the greatest factor in equality today). Second, oppression demands art, in a manner of speaking. It is natural to respond to oppression with art. It is not natural to respond to commercialism any other way except buying. Commercialism is designed to disarm us completely, to find what we like and use it against what might be our better sense. Commercialism is designed to lull us, not oppress us. More importantly, commercialism is adding to the idiom in its own way, changing and manipulating it to its own ends, not simply appropriating it.

To resist this appropriation, an artist can respond in several ways. The artist may create a whole new set of terminology foreign to commercialism, in a manner similar to the music of Ornette Coleman or John Cage. That is, reject the general terminology of art for the sake of creating a new kind that is impossible either by technology or “principle” of commercialism. One composer, Patrick Kavanaugh (who, incidentally, studied with Cage), went so far as to divide the octave into three hundred notes (as opposed to the traditional twelve). Much of his music can only be performed on computer. Another approach an artist can take is to simply be so far ahead of the music curve as to risk alienation. One might think of groups like Wilco, with their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and later A Ghost is Born, shaking the commercial music world. The problem with this option is that critics are often so anxious to predict the next great thing that the speed at which the curve changes is almost impossible to beat. It seems almost as if many artists accidentally find themselves ahead of the curve in some manner[1]. The last option, however, is to mine the idiom. That is, to take the artistic history that’s been given and use it to express oneself. This, in one sense, is what is happening with “found” art, people who use reuse found objects only to create a piece. There is another sense in which this can be accomplished: to mine the various idioms of society—ones that have been thrown out, overused, or forgotten—dust them off and express via those objects. This ultimately exposes the absurdity of the speed at which commercial culture is paced by reminding the listeners of past wreckage, long forgotten in the garbage dump of commercialism. This is the method Sufjan Stevens employs.

To understand how Stevens’ album works to resist commercialism and the changing speed of idiom, one must consider the album as a whole. This is necessary to simply get a hold of the album to begin with. With titles such as “The Black Hawk War, Or, How To Demolish An Entire Civilization And Still Feel Good About Yourself In The Morning, Or, We Apologize For The Inconvenience But You’re Going to Have To Leave Now, Or…” and “A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane But For Very Good Reasons,” it is impossible not to consider the whole scope of the album seeking an explanation. One can imagine the difficulty a commercial radio DJ would have in saying that title, or the trouble MTV might have in fitting that whole title in the corner of a music video. Perhaps this explains why the song simply titled “Chicago” has been one of the most popular tracks from the album and received the most commercial attention. The fact that Stevens would even title one of his songs a “Reprise” seems to indicate he is interested in exposing the seams of the album’s framework. This is confirmed by the absurd extremes to which he pushes the song titles. Additionally, when one considers the interplay between Come On! Feel the Illinoise! and its B-sides companion The Avalanche the interplay between the images of the songs is clearly meant to be seen on the level of the album as a whole. Stevens originally intended to make Illinoise! a double album, but decided to release half the album in its current form and clean up the rest for a B-sides track. It is notable that the most popular song from Illinoise! “Chicago” is reprised three more times on The Avalanche, clearly indicating the concept’s larger unexposed framework of even the most popular and commercialized aspects of the album. If somebody unfamiliar with the work of Stevens as a whole mentions their favorite Sufjan track is “Chicago” one can retort “which one?” Sufjan seems intent on undermining the commercial success of even his own songs.

Looking at Sufjan’s songs specifically, one clearly sees an use of idiom. The idiom, however, is separate from what Williams ever conceived. For Williams, the idiom is chickens and a red wheelbarrow, linguistically speaking; historically speaking, it is Ben Franklin, Montezuma, the Pilgrims. Stevens mixes history and idioms of language, theology, and music all seamlessly together. In the title track of the Illinoise! album, Stevens works together many figures prominently (and not so prominently) playing in the history of Illinois (particularly Chicago): Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Sandburg, Cream of Wheat. This is true for the whole album and The Avalanche; the listener encounters Abraham Lincoln, Saul Bellow, the Kaskaskia River (Sufjan is particularly fond of bodies of water), even Superman. History stands for Stevens, much like it does for Williams: a place to draw inspiration from, a well to continually drink at. Like Williams, Stevens seems to often speak from the position of a third person omniscient narrator, but other times, he simply encounters them, as one might encounter somebody in the street. Sufjan is haunted by this Holy Ghost of history, in a sense.

What is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this all is the similarity of approach between William Carlos Williams and Sufjan Stevens to history as an object. Though it is not especially clear why both artists relate to history and idiom as objects, it is clear that the two are closely related.

Much of Stevens’ writing is object oriented not only towards history, but towards the idioms of the every day, as it is for Williams. Consider the song Casimir Pulaski Day, a delicately crafted love song mined from the memories of Sufjan’s personal history. The song begins “Golden rod and the 4-H stone / The things I brought you / When I found out you had cancer of the bone” (1-3). It is full of literal objects, the artifacts of love and the personal history shared between two people that the objects imply. It continues to recount deeply personal encounters through a very object oriented lens: “In the morning through the window shade / When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade / I could see what you were reading” (7-9) and “Tuesday night at the bible study / We lift our hands and pray over your body / But nothing ever happens” (13-15). There is a powerlessness communicated through these objects, a sense that as Sufjan’s lover slips away into nothingness, these objects will be hollowed out of meaning. The body of the lover itself is even objectified in “the shoulder blade” and “we pray over your body.” In one sense, this death is a devastating blow to objectness. It could, however, be seen as a radical affirmation of them, that there is a value to reciting these objects of history, and remembering the various objects that helped compose their life together. It is extremely reminiscent of Mina Loy’s “Letters of the Unliving” in which she muses on the various objects left behind by a dead partner, and wonders if they can still be considered as “from” a person who no longer is. There is, of course, the larger theological theme in Sufjan’s work, particularly evident here. God is at once praised for His gifts—“Oh the glory that the Lord has made / And the complications you could do without / When I kissed you on the mouth” (10-12)—and also cursed for such giving and taking—“ Oh the glory when He took our place / But He took my shoulders and He shook my face / And He takes and He takes and He takes” (40-42). But it is in this giving and taking of these objects, that God’s existence if verified for Stevens. More importantly, it is His existence that allows these objects to be drawn together in a meaningful way. God has given and taken the object from Stevens, but has also given Stevens the means to keep the object alive and meaningful. That is one thing unique to Stevens, and the one thing lacking in Williams’ work. Sufjan’s personal history is as valid a topic as the state history. In fact, it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Layered in the album amongst songs celebrating state history, Casimir Pulaski Day (of which the only mention in the song is “On the first of March, on the holiday”) places Sufjan’s personal history in the midst of the state’s. It is Sufjan’s cosmology, however, that allows him to do this. For Sufjan, there is a God that gives value and cohesion to seemingly emptied out objects. But God is not freed from complexities of the pain surrounding those objects. He is implicated in this history as much as Stevens himself. There is no Deus Ex Machina saving Sufjan’s precious objects, but rather the hand of God that both slaps and comforts. This is ultimately the difference between Loy’s take on absence and Sufjan’s. Loy allows herself to be caught up in the objects, but cannot escape the pain of absence—she begs it to be taken away. Sufjan, however, lives constantly in the absence, in both the giving of Christ’s life and the taking of love, as the very last stanza indicates. Williams, by contrast also, simply does not implicate himself with the objects. They are largely separate from him, and if they are absent. There is a grief to saying “nobody to drive the car” as he does in “To Elsie,” but it is not explicitly his. It is the grief of those who read his poetry and engage the objects.

The sheer complexity of Sufjan’s work, arising both out of his personal history and state history, its disparateness of topic, keeps it from being effectively appropriated. The one thing commercialism has working against it is the need to satisfy short attention spans. Thirty seconds of a Sufjan begs for the whole song, which begs for the whole album, which begs for a deeper understanding and multiple listens. And yet Stevens’ music is not unnecessarily complex, not a maze one must wander through to get to the center of meaning. It focuses rather on complexity of implication. It challenges the listener to make sense of their own life, to appropriate his music for themselves through the object of the album. The meaning is simple, the expression is plain, but the implications are vast.

Williams’ understanding and use of idiom provides important shoulders for an artist like Sufjan Stevens to stand on. In some sense, he too provides this complexity of implication, rather than meaning, though Williams lack of personality in his poetry leaves a space for the reader to completely fill. There really is no implication of Williams’ personality in his poetry, and one wonders where Williams work might have gone had he allowed himself a more personal relationship with the objects he himself was creating. He still stands, of course, as a testament to the power of idiom, particularly his American Idiom, the mantle of which, artists will surely carry for years to come.

Bibliography

Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1933.

Appendix

Come On! Feel the Illinoise!

Sufjan Stevens

Oh great intentions
I've got the best of interventions
But when the ads come
I think about it now

In my infliction
Entrepreneurial conditions
Take us to glory
I think about it now

Cannot conversations cull United Nations?
If you got the patience, celebrate the ancients
Cannot all creation call it celebration?
Or United Nation. Put it to your head.

Oh great white city
I've got the adequate committee
Where have your walls gone?
I think about it now

Chicago, in fashion, the soft drinks, expansion
Oh Columbia!
From Paris, incentive, like Cream of Wheat invented,
The Ferris Wheel!

Oh great intentions
Covenant with the imitation
Have you no conscience?
I think about it now

Oh God of progress
Have you degraded or forgot us?
Where have your laws gone?
I think about it now

Ancient hieroglyphic or the South Pacific
Typically terrific, busy and prolific

Classical devotion, architect promotion
Lacking in emotion. Think about it now.

Chicago, the New Age, but what would Frank Lloyd Wright say?
Oh Columbia!
Amusement or treasure, these optimistic pleasures
Like the Ferris Wheel!

Cannot conversations cull United Nations?
If you got the patience, celebrate the ancients

Columbia!

I cried myself to sleep last night
And the ghost of Carl, he approached my window
I was hypnotized, I was asked
To improvise
On the attitude, the regret
Of a thousand centuries of death

Even with the heart of terror and the superstitious wearer
I am riding all alone
I am writing all alone

Even in my best condition, counting all the superstition
I am riding all alone
I am running all alone

And we laughed at the beatitudes of a thousand lines
We were asked at the attitudes
They reminded us of death

Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

And I cried myself to sleep last night
For the Earth, and materials, they may sound just right to me

Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

Casimir Pulaski Day

Sufjan Stevens

Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

Your father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car to the Navy yard 5
Just to prove that he was sorry

In the morning through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading

Oh the glory that the Lord has made 10
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

Tuesday night at the bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens 15

I remember at Michael's house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night 20
And you told me you were scared

Oh the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you

Sunday night when I cleaned the house 25
I find the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of your mother

On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom 30

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday 35
I thought I saw you breathing

Oh the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window

Oh the glory when He took our place 40
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes

[1] This is really what Wilco’s song “The Late Greats” is a response to: the Gnostic knowledge of music criticism, always seeking out the unheard, “the greatest lost song of all time.”

Heaney’s “Mossbawn” and the Absences of Love

2007-10-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

As a refugee within his own country, Seamus Heaney’s poetry is often concerned with his place among his own people. It is particularly concerned with the domestic, and, in exploring the placement of others in the domestic, he is placing himself in an analogous relationship to those about whom he is writing. In particular, “Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication” is a conscious nod to this act. “Mossbawn” particularly focuses on the idea of absences, which Heaney uses to achieve his own placement.

It is important to note from the beginning, these are two separate poems that are gathered together under the act of dedication. This helps rectify the disjunction between the two sections, the somewhat jarring lack of continuity. It also allows the poem to be analyzed as a single writing act—two separate poems, but one act of writing. For the brief purposes of this paper, I use the word act to connect the two separate poems. Even if they were written separately, with separate inspirations, methods, etc., Heaney’s grouping asks us to read them together, as if they were one poem. To borrow Trinitarian language, “Mossbawn” is two poems in person, but one in essence.

Subtitled “Two Poems in Dedication,” it is also dedicated to Heaney’s wife, Mary. This double dedication is the first indication of its self-awareness as a poetic act. It would not be unexpected for the reader to presume that the “she” in the first section is Mary both because of this dedication, and because of the poem’s imagistic intimacy. There is first in the poem a “sunlit absence” (1), but this absence is filled with leftovers of human action, “the helmeted pump in they yard” where “water honeyed / in the slung bucket” (2-5). Somebody—the “her” that first appears in line 10, presumably—has set the bucket under the faucet after using it. Some of the water originally poured for use remains. These leftovers signify both the work that has been done, and the absence of the worker. The sun which lights the absence also stands as a signifier of passing time. It hangs in the sky like a hung skillet cools against the wall after use (6-8). In line 9, Heaney makes a startling metaphor out of the wall the skillet is hung on. He calls it the “long afternoon.” As the skillet is the sun, the wall is the sky it moves across while it cools after the height of noonday heat. The noonday heat is the use of the skillet during daily work. Heaney’s larger metaphor connects the passage time in the workday with the work that is done during the day. It is a sparse, but tightly wound metaphor.

Heaney then moves indoors to the only person in the poem, whose absence has been pondered in the first part—a household matron at work about the house. After things have cooled some, she spends time baking, the oven rekindling the heat of the day as the scones rise. Again there is the image of passing time: “the ticking of two clocks” and rising scones (23-24). Again, the image is related to the work accomplished during the day. The tasks are the passing of time itself. Heaney invokes absence once more: “here is a space / again” (22-23). This time, however, it is the absence of action. It is waiting, a rest and Sabbath, similar to the rest of the skillet on the wall or the sun in the sky after a period of intense heat, intense work. While she waits, there is the evidence of work on her: whitened nails from the flour and “measling shins” from the heat of the stove (21). The intertwining here, between worker and work, evidence of each other left on both (c.f., the bucket left under the faucet with unused water in it) is similar to the intertwining of time and daily work. Both metaphors are connected in the various absences of the poem. It is in these absences that love lies. This is clinched by the last stanza, an image of a used tool:

And here is love

like a tinsmith’s scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin. (25-28)

Part 2 of Heaney’s poem, “The Seed Cutters” is placed next to “Sunlight” to both continue the theme of absences, but also to place himself in the larger context of poetry. There is a self-conscious nod to Heaney’s own place as an artist in ‘painting’ this portrait. He says “Brueghel, / You’ll know them if I can get them true” (29-30). Brueghel is famous, of course, for his portraits of peasants and folk culture, something for which Heaney is also known. Brueghel is the perfect person to stand in for Heaney’s own art in this poem: the artist who stands by and steadfastly captures the actions of those around him, particularly those close to him. We know from Heaney’s other poetry that he often reserves the sonnet form for those with whom he is especially close (c.f., “Glanmore Sonnets”). The seed cutters of this poem are not named, in the same way Heaney does not name himself, though he does write in the first person, placing his work among the seed cutters. There is an echo here of Heaney’s poem “Digging,” where he explicitly compares the spade with which his father digs to his own pen. This comparison stresses both the mimetic and creative aspects of art. He is both imitating his father and doing the work of creation. Similarly in part 2 Heaney’s work is mirrored in the work of the seed cutters.

The anonymity of both workers and writer is itself explicitly mentioned in the final lines: “Under the broom / Yellowing over them, compose the frieze / With all of us there, our anonymities” (40-42). In this final line, Heaney places himself in the picture literally, describing the way in which the scene itself frames them, creates their picture. In many ways, Heaney is only a mimetic conduit for this framing. Yet he also actively paints himself into the portrait, both through his mention of Brueghel and in the way his own poetry is mirrored by the work of the seed cutters.

This anonymity is also a type of absence in the poem. Art is necessarily full of absences. Its mimetic nature creates a hollow shell, which, as Socrates points out, lacks the self, or reality of the original object (or scene, in this case). Yet from “Sunlight,” we see that it is in the absences—the leftovers of human activity, the Sabbath rest after the act of creation—that love lies. There is love, then, in the art of Heaney, through his absence of creation, similar to the way the love of the woman in “Sunlight” is demonstrated in her absences.

More importantly, it is in these gaps that Heaney places himself and his art. As I said, art is necessarily mimetic, a gap unto itself, but there is also the creative energy that seems to find its own restless place only in this gap. Heaney’s act of creation is itself love, a work of tribute. This love is the source of Heaney’s creative energy. Such energy is present in the act itself—the work of the poem, so to speak—but it is more present in the poem’s silence on the page, like the subject of “Sunlight.” One could ask if a poem exists on the page, and there is no one there to read it, is it still a poem? Or is it simply a collection of words? Heaney’s poetry makes the case that there is love in the absences, and it is in these absences where he finds himself. If a poem ceased to be a poem when there was nobody to read it, then Heaney, and the love in his poems, would cease to be also. It is in the silence of Heaney’s poetry that it speaks. It is in the waiting of the book on the shelf that his poetry exists, long after the heat of creativity has cooled, and only the leftovers of human action remain.

Appendix

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

for Mary Heaney

1. Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence. 1

The helmeted pump in the yard

heated its iron,

water honeyed

in the slung bucket 5

and the sun stood

like a griddle cooling

against the wall

of each long afternoon.

So, her hands scuffled 10

over the bakeboard,

the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat

against her where she stood

in a floury apron 15

by the window.

Now she dusts the board

with a goose’s wing,

now sits, broad-lapped,

with whitened nails 20

and measling shins:

here is a space

again, the scone rising

to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love 25

like a tinsmith’s scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin.

2. The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

You’ll know them if I can get them true. 30

They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes

Buried under that straw. With time to kill, 35

They take their time. Each sharp knife goes

Lazily halving each root that falls apart

In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom 40

Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

With all of us there, our anonymities.

Incantations : Michael S. Harper, A Love Supreme

2007-10-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

It is almost impossible to read Michael S. Harper and not feel as though you are missing out on some sort of Gnostic gospel of jazz. “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” seems to revel in its own incantatory song of praise. When you consider the history of the phrase “a love supreme,” the title and incantatory phrase from John Coltrane’s own album of praise, some of the “Gnostic” implications are clear. The poem “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” indeed, much of Harper’s work, proceeds from history and art, particularly jazz, in manners both implicit and explicit. He does this in “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” in particular, modeling his lines and rhythm, as well as content on John Coltrane’s exultant album. This essay will draw the parallels between Michael S. Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” and Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme, particularly focusing on the incantatory nature of the poem, which is, in essence, a song of praise.

It is helpful to understand the structure of Coltrane’s album, particularly “Pt. I – Acknowledgement.” The album/song opens with a gong and cymbal swell and Coltrane riffing on the pentatonic for a moment, before leaving the cymbals alone to hearken the entrance of Jimmy Garrison’s bass line, the riff from which the album takes its iambic name. Harper, too, begins with this as his epigraph in italics, setting it apart from the rest of the textual tone: “a love supreme, a love supreme / a love supreme, a love supreme.” It is an incantation, and it couches the rest of the poem’s meditations. That Harper’s language becomes almost a musical drumbeat is no surprise, as it mirror’s Coltrane’s saxophone in A Love Supreme, which almost speaks. Indeed, the fourth movement on Coltrane’s album is based on a poem he includes in the album’s liner notes, “Psalm.” When listening to “Pt. IV – Psalm” it is possible to hear Coltrane literally playing through the poem, continually coming back to the minor third, the incantatory dactyl “Thank you God.” Not only this, but Coltrane actually speaks the phrase “a love supreme” in the album’s first track, repetitively, incantatorially. While Harper’s epigraph certainly alludes to this unexpected moment in Coltrane’s album, it also alludes to the bass line continually thrumbing this rhythm throughout the first movement (excepting the moments when it is left to Coltrane’s saxophone alone).

Harper’s meditations on the many particulars of John Coltrane’s life make up the rest of the poem. The poem could be seen as an attempt to rectify the particulars of Coltrane’s life with the phraseology of his music that seems to sum things up so well. Harper opens the poem with the words “Sex fingers toes” (1). It could be a list, undifferentiated by the lack of commas to set the words apart, or it could be a mishmash of all those things: the use of it as a whole line indicating a singularity of these items. The latter seems more likely (and infinitely more suggestive), when one considers the contained completeness of the lines that follow:

in the marketplace

near your father's church

in Hamlet, North Carolina—

witness to this love

in this calm fallow

of these minds,

there is no substitute for pain (2-8)

Each line is rhythmically contained, ending on downbeats, suggesting their end stop. This downbeat end stop continues until line 14, when he ends with the deliberately accented end stop, the first incantation “a love supreme;” (14). Although the line ends on an accent, it is grammatically completed with a semi-colon. But its accent, in addition to the slant rhyme with line 15, sends the reader into the next line with the incantation still echoing, the surprisingly haunting question: “what does it all mean?” (15). This question is perhaps the starkest line in the whole poem, both an angst ridden cliché and startlingly honest plea for understanding.

The next set of lines (16-24) serves to establish some more of Coltrane’s history, a picture of him playing A Love Supreme in Scranton, Pennsylvania. This section ends with the incantation, introduced with a colon, similar to its previous use with the poetic text at line 14. Both are loosely linked to the content of the previous phrase, grammatically worked into the sentence. There is a difference this time, though: “a love supreme—” (24). The long dash at the end indicates a sudden stop, a change in thought even. This dash also brings about the break in stanza, indicative of the larger shift.

The next stanza does not contain much in the way of literal personal history, although many implications could be drawn, especially if one is familiar with the life of John Coltrane, particularly his abuse of heroin. Again, there is the mishmash of words grouped in these lines:

thick sin 'tween

impotence and death, fuel

the tenor sax cannibal

heart, genitals, and sweat

that makes you clean—

a love supreme, a love supreme— (26-31)

The pace of the phrases increases, due to the assonance that appears in the first part of these lines. Harper also cuts the phrase “fuel the tenor sax cannibal heart” after fuel and cannibal. This too, adds to the increased pacing and shift in intonation. Harper’s intonations shift with the various meditations, always coming back to “a love supreme,” which shifts with the various tonalities of Harper’s language, the same way Coltrane’s saxophone explores the phrase’s various modalities through “Pt. I – Acknowledgement.” Once again, there is the almost frenetic mishmash of words: “sax cannibal / heart.” It is almost incantatory, almost senseless. The words together, though grammatically senseless, form a cumulative effect, like the repetition of “a love supreme.” It also helps establish the theme of body in the poem. This idea of body is continued with the phrase “genitals, and sweat / that makes you clean— / a love supreme, a love supreme—”. Again, slant rhyme connects the incantation with its neighboring line. Whereas before it connects it with the question “what does it all mean?”, here it is connected with phrases of the body, emphasizing this theme of body, particularly the sexuality of the body.

The theme of the sexual body continues in the third stanza, a playful one, repeating “cause I am” in response to every question as to why a particular person (Coltrane presumably) is so “funky,” “sweet,” and especially “black.” The sudden intrusion of this out-of-character stanza is set off by the dash after “a love supreme” in line 31, performing here a similar function to the identical phrase in line 24. The dash allows for the change in voice and intonation. In the third stanza, Harper is mixing themes of race and sexuality, creating another incantation within the incantation of the whole poem: “because I am.” More interestingly, he is mashing the lines together with little respect for grammar. The first word is capitalized, and there are question marks throughout, but the stanza is largely run together grammatically. This is indicated, primarily, by the lack of capitalization. The lines are cut in ways that would be expected, giving the sense of grammar to one who only hears it, but this whole stanza could be considered a continuation of the mishmash technique Harper employs throughout the poem.

Harper ends the third stanza, once again, with “a love supreme:” connecting it to the song as a whole, acting in many ways, like a chorus of sorts. This time, however, “a love supreme” is followed by a colon, a first in the poem. This colon connects the very final stanza with the penultimate stanza, even though there is a significant visual break between them, and the last stanza lacks the italics of the penultimate (excepting, of course, the final lines). Harper is subclausing the whole fourth stanza to the third, in a way. It is a reversal for the poem in that the song-like italics have always been subclaused to the generally fact-oriented non-italics. Before, all the song lyrics were proceeding from the facts of Coltrane’s life. Now, the finality of Coltrane’s end (which seems imminent), proceeds from his music. The tail is wagging the dog, so to speak, and the speaker is disappointed that Coltrane can barely play (43-45). This makes the final two phrases, incantations of “a love supreme, a love supreme—”, all the more poignant. It’s as if Coltrane is trying to gasp out the last phrases himself, but ultimately comes off “flat” (45). The poem comes full circle to the epigraph, only this time, the phrase is cut off by the dash, suggesting the possibility, the hope of more. But the reader is left hanging by the final dash, an interruption, rather than an end.

Harper’s poem, ultimately, is rooted in the body, the “sex fingers toes” of Coltrane’s life, the mashing of the saxophone keys that produces his music. And, ultimately, it is Coltrane’s body that betrays him, snuffs out his particulars, rumbles over him, the same way his incantation continues, even after he is done. Though “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” was written before Coltrane’s death, it foretells the continuation of the artist, his incantation that arises out of the particulars of his life.

Appendix

Dear John, Dear Coltrane

a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes 1

in the marketplace

near your father's church

in Hamlet, North Carolina—

witness to this love 5

in this calm fallow

of these minds,

there is no substitute for pain:

genitals gone or going,

seed burned out, 10

you tuck the roots in the earth,

turn back, and move

by river through the swamps,

singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;

what does it all mean? 15

Loss, so great each black

woman expects your failure

in mute change, the seed gone.

You plod up into the electric city—

your song now crystal and 20

the blues. You pick up the horn

with some will and blow

into the freezing night:

a love supreme, a love supreme—

Dawn comes and you cook 25

up the thick sin 'tween

impotence and death, fuel

the tenor sax cannibal

heart, genitals, and sweat

that makes you clean— 30

a love supreme, a love supreme—

Why you so black?

cause I am

why you so funky?

cause I am 35

why you so black?

cause I am

why you so sweet?

cause I am

why you so black? 40

cause I am

a love supreme, a love supreme:

So sick

you couldn't play Naima,

so flat we ached 45

for song you'd concealed

with your own blood,

your diseased liver gave

out its purity,

the inflated heart 50

pumps out, the tenor kiss,

tenor love:

a love supreme, a love supreme—

A Love Supreme

John Coltrane

I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord. 1

It all has to do with it.

Thank you God.

Peace.

There is none other. 5

God is. It is so beautiful.

Thank you God. God is all.

Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses.

Thank you God.

In You all things are possible. 10

We know. God made us so.

Keep your eye on God.

God is. He always was. He always will be.

No matter what . . . it is God.

He is gracious and merciful. 15

It is most important that I know Thee.

Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,

fears and emotions — time — all related . . .

all made from one . . . all made in one.

Blessed be His name. 20

Thought waves — heat waves — all vibrations —

all paths lead to God. Thank you God.

His way . . . it is so lovely . . . it is gracious.

It is merciful — thank you God.

One thought can produce millions of vibrations 25

and they all go back to God . . . everything does.

Thank you God.

Have no fear . . . believe . . . thank you God.

The universe has many wonders. God is all.

His way . . . it is so wonderful. 30

Thoughts — deeds — vibrations, etc.

They all go back to God and He cleanses all.

He is gracious and merciful . . . thank you God.

Glory to God . . . God is so alive.

God is. 35

God loves.

May I be acceptable in Thy sight.

We are all one in His grace.

The fact that we do exist is acknowledgement

of Thee O Lord. 40

Thank you God.

God will wash away all our tears . . .

He always has . . .

He always will.

Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday. 45

Let us sing all songs to God

To whom all praise is due . . . praise God.

No road is an easy one, but they all

go back to God.

With all we share God. 50

It is all with God.

It is all with Thee.

Obey the Lord.

Blessed is He.

We are from one thing . . . the will of God . . . 55

thank you God.

I have seen God — I have seen ungodly —

none can be greater — none can compare to God.

Thank you God.

He will remake us . . . He always has and He 60

always will.

It is true — blessed be His name — thank you God.

God breathes through us so completely . . .

so gently we hardly feel it . . . yet,

it is our everything. 65

Thank you God.

ELATION — ELEGANCE — EXALTATION —

All from God.

Thank you God. Amen.

2006-11-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

Poem in which Longinus and I meet halfway

I am sitting with some chicken, soggy fries and

a hefeweizen I have just begun to enjoy

and I know I have missed too many nights like this.

I’m in my boxers at the kitchen table

in November with the windows open and

the landlord’s heat turned so high I almost feel like

summer—the back porch of Marisia’s third floor apartment—

the best view in all of Binghamton I always thought,

though you could only see the state building against

the mountains and some blinking radio tower lights.

But that was all it took, because though I never said it

Binghamton was an ugly place, but that view was

sublime. Because what do absolutes matter?

when you speak of transport,

only context does. And that view was beautiful.

for the proper formatting of this poem...click here

2006-11-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

Brooklyn Tenebre
My soul is an empty carousel at sunset.
~Pablo Neruda

De railroad bridge's
A sad song in de air.
~Langston Hughes

We left behind some lonely women there.
Our mix tapes, backpacks and Toyota used to carve
a Delphic triangle in the East:
Leesburg—Binghamton—Brooklyn
smoking shit-on-a-stick cigars from the last 7-Eleven
at the edge of Virginia in the station wagon
we were hungry, dead, buried alive in blankets,
the heater broken.

We hammered through the mountains into Binghamton,
arriving with the season’s second snow, drinking rum all the way.
There our good friends showed us hunched brown houses where
music poured from trim and rusty hinges.
There John Cage spoke prophetically to me from the buzzing silence,
the hum of heart and nervous system:
Your are here for a while
but still there is Brooklyn
always. Brooklyn.
Cease your staring:
the cicada song of window blinds
will rob your soul.

Late afternoon on Saturday we left and entered New York City
boroughs labeled like the books of the Apocrypha
inching traffic jammed the brimming tunnels
veined into the city and awash with fumes
as if a mechanical island-palm held up this five fingered civilization.
We traveled up the index finger.
There we found Brooklyn, brownstoned and Bridged
hoary like the beard of great Whitman
whom we saw selling gold Rolex on the street corner.
Poetry will fall on hard times, now and then, he said.
But we avoided his hobo advice
and slid along the El with his late night brothers
into the center of that beating hand—
Ah God, Times Square could be the second coming of Christ!
Hassidic Jews clamoring, proclaiming! Vendors vending!
Citizens running! I heard America singing
each to each, a primitive song, harmonized ambiguity
and we like prophets for a burning truth
ashed as cigarettes would into the wind of voices:
a great religious crash.

We gathered ourselves Sunday morning with a quiet breakfast.
We thought to venture out once more from Brooklyn.
The city was asleep.
We lingered over streets and ate two hot dogs each.
I abandoned my journal to the sidewalk sea
and we slipped out from the city in the dipping sun
to drive back to things that drove us out before.

Prose Passage Assignment...

2006-04-11T22:16:00.000-07:00

In my poetry workshop, we had an assignment to take a line of prose and build a poem upon it. The passage I chose was from the book Blindness by José Saramago...a book we're reading in my creative fiction class.

The Blind Man
That night the blind man dreamt he was blind.
~José Saramago

That night the blind man
dreamt that he was blind
which was odd
because he always dreamt that he could see.

He stumbled around the house,
stubbing his foot on the bathtub
and unable to find his
keys.

He picked up a book
and tried to read it.He ran his fingers
over the mute images.

He dialed the wrong number
and had to apologize profusely,
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s
happened. Usually, I can see
in my dreams.”

Then he sat and cried
like he did sometimes
when he was awake.

The Whiteness of the Whale: Simulacra and Metonymy in Moby-Dick

2006-03-24T18:51:00.000-08:00

One of the most enticing aspects of Melville’s Moby-Dick is the broad range of symbolic interpretations to which the text lends itself. Perhaps Melville was aware of this, and that is the reason he wrote “The Doubloon” chapter, realizing that the interpretations of such a symbolically rich work would vary as abundantly as the multiple species of whale that he documents. It would seem then, that the more fruitful route of critical interpretation is not in aligning Melville with any political ideal (such as Marxism), but rather understanding the apparatus of his symbolism. That is, raising the central symbols to meta-symbols, understanding Melville’s work as a commentary on the nature of symbol and metaphor in his own work.
Defined, a symbol can represent and conjure many images in the mind of the reader. The white whale can mean many things to many people, and thus it constitutes a symbol. But if one is to propose an interpretation of Moby-Dick, then the white whale must be a metaphor, representative of a more singular concrete idea. Melville is undeniably a symbolist, but it seems that he was aware his work would be interpreted in a multitude of ways. This paper will suggest that Melville was aware that readers were going to insert themselves into the text, and this awareness shows through in his writing. This paper will discuss the central symbol of whiteness as a metaphor for metonymy (which is demonstrated to be simulacrum). It will also discuss the whale as a metaphor for the text itself. Utilizing Baudrillard’s idea of “simulacra,” it will discuss the metonymy of whiteness and justify this interpretation. It will prove that Melville’s Moby-Dick is, in part, a meta-commentary on itself and that it is a meta-narrative about the very composition of the text.
Jean Baudrillard describes simulacra as something which is neither completely imaginary nor completely real. He talks about simulacra in terms of language: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (Baudrillard 2). Baudrillard gives the example of a hostage situation. If the reader were to pretend to hold a bank hostage, entering a bank with weapons and showing forth all the signs of a hostage situation, the authorities would act as if it were a real hostage situation. Even though the reader is only simulating a hostage situation. He says “In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play” (Baudrillard 13). As he says elsewhere, “The simulacrum is true” (Baudrillard 1). There are echoes of this idea in “The Doubloon” chapter. Following Ahab’s egotistical interpretation of the images on the doubloon, Starbuck makes his own interpretation. Yet he refuses to take any stock in his own interpretation of it, saying “I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely” (Melville 360). Starbuck understands that if he is to take his interpretation as truth, he would draw hope from it and act accordingly. But he understands that his interpretation is pure simulacrum, a “truth” that will show forth later only to be a masking of the absence of truth. The doubloon is simply a coin with no significance, though Melville’s narrative framing would have us interpreting it as a symbol. On an interpretive level, the “Doubloon” chapter suggests that symbol is simulacrum.
The symbol can be interpreted as simulacrum in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” also. In it, Melville discusses at great length the significance of the fact that Moby-Dick is white. He is delving here into the many possible symbolic meanings of this whiteness. He says “whiteness refiningly enhances beauty as if imparting some special virtue of its own” (Melville 163). There is, of course, the racial whiteness, which Melville is extremely conscious of throughout the novel, and thus the idealization of the whale might be an idealization of the white man. There are many possible religious interpretations, each stemming from various religious traditions that feature white as a prominent symbol. There is also the image of “marble pallor” (Melville 166) of a dead person; the whale could possibly be a symbol of death. The possible symbolic interpretations of the whiteness of the whale are too numerous to count. But then Melville suggests something intriguing:
…is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and a the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of the young girls; all these are but subtile [sic] deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely pains like a harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within. (170)
Whiteness suggests nothing at first to the viewer, yet seems full of meaning somehow. It is deceptively complex in that while seeming to lack color, white actually contains all colors. And Nature’s colored garments, which convey a fullness of life, are penetrated only to reveal a complete lack of life: the absence of the “basic reality” that it purports to convey.
Melville’s text also explores the metaphor as simulacra. To understand this, though, it helps to look at Baudrillard’s progression of simulacra:
1 It is a basic reflection of reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard 5)
Consider the central image of whiteness in terms of this progression. The basic narrative reality of the text is that the Moby-Dick is being hunted. In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Melville attaches whiteness inextricably with the whale. White becomes metonymical[1] for the whale and its significance in the text, both to the reader and the characters within the narrative. So white comes to reflect the basic narrative reality of the text; whiteness evokes the central mission. But in it does not simply reflect the simple mission. Through symbolic interpretation (see “The Whiteness of the Whale”), it brings its own significance, and intertwines that significance with the basic narrative reality of the text; it “masks and perverts” that basic reality. In the new understanding of whiteness, the whale is absent; it is a blending in the reader’s mind of the text’s basic narrative reality and the symbolic suggestiveness of whiteness. Thus, the term “white” is pure simulacrum. When Melville uses the description of white, or speaks of things that are white, the term itself is hollow, in that there is no such reality that is a blend of Moby-Dick’s narrative reality and white symbolism.
With this new understanding of “whiteness” in mind, consider now the many things in the text that are white. One particular object to consider is Ahab’s white leg, carved from the bone of a sperm whale. Through the simulacrum of whiteness, it evokes the simple narrative drive to capture the white whale, and also the philosophical implications implied in the symbolism of the “Whiteness of the Whale.” The significance of the fact that Ahab lost his leg to Moby-Dick and has it splintered by the white whale again in the final chase is magnified by the simple descriptive term “white.” That is, something being white calls attention to it as serving a significant narrative and symbolic role. Additionally, the cycle of simulacra is compounded: the narrative and symbolic significance of Ahab’s white leg is attached to “whiteness.” It is, just as Baudrillard says, “not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (5).
Pulling back from the endless series of mirrors that is simulacra, one must realize the important thing that Melville has done here: “whiteness,” whose symbolic significance is simulacrum, functions as simulacrum. Regardless of authorial intent, the text is clearly making some sort of meta-commentary on itself. If Whiteness is simulacra, and they are pursuing a white whale, they are pursuing a structure of simulacrum, in essence. The question then, appropriately enough, must be our original question: what is the whale symbolic of? What is the structure of simulacrum? The text clues us in:
Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence….Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who reads in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. (293)
Melville tells us to treat the white whale as if he were a text. He tells us to decipher what we are able. Moby-Dick, it seems, is symbolic of Moby-Dick. If this is the case, then Melville is Ishmael, the narrator. Or perhaps Melville is Ahab, driven by monomaniacal desire to pursue a text of pure simulacrum. For Ahab, it was a mission that was ultimately fruitless. Perhaps it was also this way for Melville.
[1] see Cuddon 507

an encounter with ted kooser

2006-03-22T19:41:00.000-08:00

click here

a sonnet

2006-03-08T19:58:00.000-08:00

O round and unknowable, unrhymable,
thick skinned, full of letters, spongy and porous,
O you, of whom I write this sonnet-chorus,
whom challenged fingers struggle to be able
to find their way beneath the colored surface,
through flesh, then rug, and to the pulpy center
(but first it takes a knife to pierce and enter):
O are you worth my eighty five cent purchase?

If I should hold you forth in my left hand palm,
and plunge my right hand fingers in your navel,
and rip away the layers between your heart
and mine, would you try your best to do your part,
kiss my lips with citrus and the love I long
to hear from someone’s mouth. O are you able?

untitled story

2006-03-05T23:24:00.000-08:00

Tall buildings shake,
voices escape, singing sad, sad songs.

~Wilco

Who told you that numbers are cold and unemotional? All you need to do is watch the New York Lotto drawing one night and you will know whoever says that is wrong. Some people make the mistake of believing it’s only the humans who bring emotion to the lotto. The truth is that the numbers are emotional. Maybe it’s fate or God behind the numbers, working, toying, loving.
If I said I could understand numbers, mathematicians would laugh at me. I use “gambler’s math,” which says if a certain set of numbers hasn’t come up in a while, it will come up soon. It’s like flipping a coin; fifty percent of the time it’s going to be heads. A mathematician, of course, would explain that there is no guarantee one hundred flips will be exactly fifty-fifty, because the law of averages doesn’t guarantee a percentage within a certain number of flips. You could flip a coin like Rosencrantz and never get anything except heads. But at some point, tails is going to come up, and what I do is try to guess when. I also guess combinations. The lotto drawing is never a simple either/or. It’s strings of numbers; it’s combinations.
In truth, though, there is little method to my work. I don’t crunch numbers. Crunching numbers is for calculators and idiot-savants. I am not logical. I intuit patterns. I am creative. I am an artist, crafting from reams of numbers. The truth is I laugh at the mathematicians. They see nothing when they watch the lotto. I see beauty. I see humanity. I see meaning.
* * *
“Turn on the TV, man.”
“Huh? Who is this?”
“Quick! Turn it the fuck on!”
I reached under my bed sheets and grasped blindly for the remote with my right hand and limply grasped the phone with my left. I found it near my ankles and pulled it out to turn on the TV. The TV lit up with the image of one of the Twin Towers smoking. As my mind began to understand the image, a plane flew into the second tower. I heard someone say “holy shit” and I realized there was a busy signal coming from the phone in my hand.
* * *
I run a small website that makes lottery recommendations. Believe it or not, I have several thousand members, and they all swear by me. Of course, none of them win all the time. I don’t give the winning numbers, I just make recommendations for what would be best to play. To be honest, I don’t actually play the lottery myself. I used to, but I never won. That doesn’t stop me, though. Does it stop the writer from writing if he never writes the perfect story? The artist has the drive to create, and that’s why they do it; not because they think they can accomplish artistic perfection. The artist creates because he must. The truth is that it’s not about the money. It’s about the numbers. When I predict sevens on the odds and they come up, I feel the same expressive satisfaction a poet does when he reads his finished poem aloud.
* * *
I was lucky. I caught the last ride to the financial district, and I emerged just in time to see the first tower collapse, like a train speeding downwards, puffing soot in all directions. I tried to escape the cloud, but it overtook me. The soot was the building and all its inhabitants in gaseous form. I inhaled it. It smelled mostly like dust, but there was the faint smell of burnt human hair.
For a while, I couldn’t see, and I made my way along by grabbing onto cars and trying to work towards the faint light I assumed was the direction away from the tower that had fallen. The soot covered everything. Whatever my hands touched collapsed; the caked soot crumbling away to reveal the actual object beneath: a car, a lamppost, a bicycle.
* * *
I used to watch the Lotto drawings when I worked as a security guard. That’s where it began. For years I drew no contentment from my work. I went from job to job with little grounding because of an overwhelming dissatisfaction with each one. It was a dissatisfaction I could never pinpoint and the security job was only the latest on a long list of jobs. My shift began at six at night and went until seven the next morning. One night I happened to turn the TV to the New York Lotto drawing. It’s not that I hadn’t seen a lotto drawing before, but this one struck me. The numbers made sense to me; it was like I knew they were going to come up. I didn’t care that I could have won money. It was with these numbers my life finally began to find its expression: 08, 13, 26, 35, 45, 51.
* * *
I saw people jumping out of the second tower before it went down. They fell out of the windows like sacks of potatoes, lifeless in their plunge. The people standing around me were silent. There were no gasps when the north tower fell. The people watched in a numbed reverence. I imagine it was the only time New York City was quiet.
* * *
On the subway home one day a woman told me she takes pills for her sickness. “Sometimes I take them because I’m sick, and sometimes I take them to help me die.” When I got home, I recommended double threes for tragedy. Some guy told me later he won $750 on that recommendation. I’d like to think that the people who view my web site see the art of the numbers that I see. I know they believe in it, because they keep coming. I guess it takes a belief, a hope? that these things I predict are somehow expressive of something. Maybe through it I can connect, and begin to put together all the particulars of my life.
* * *
It took four showers to finally wash all the soot off my body. I had to return to work the next day. The numbers for September 12th were: 08, 13, 26, 35, 45, 51. I still remember the lotto drawing that night and what was said after calling out those numbers: “The prayers of the New York State Lottery Family are with those who were lost in yesterday’s tragedy.”

Icarus Love Poem

2006-03-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

“Remember well,”
she told me,
“Icarus flew
before he fell.”
“Yes I know,
I took Greek,”
I said
as we put weights
on our feet
and hid
heavy memories
and books in our pockets
while I thought a thing
I already knew,
Icarus fell
before he flew.

Brooklyn, 2005

2006-02-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

We set out with six hundred miles ahead.
We left behind some lonely women there.
Our mix tapes, backpacks, and Toyota, used
To carve a great triangle in the East:
Thus: Leesburg, Binghamton, Brooklyn, Leesburg

In Binghamton we lingered over thoughts
Of future times, and recent times, and beer
we never liked despite our best attempts.
Our good friends showed us hunched brown houses where
Soft music poured from trim and rusty hinges.

Late afternoon on Saturday we left
And entered New York City, traffic jammed
Out of the tunnels, inching in like blood
Through veins into a hand that held a vast
Civilization. There we found Brooklyn,
Brownstoned and Bridged and both ancient and new.
We avoided those we knew there (except
To spend the night), and slid along the El
Into the center of the beating hand.
Ah God, Times Square was the second coming
Of Christ! Hassidic Jews rejoicing and
Proclaiming! Vendors vending! Citizens
Running! I heard America singing…

Then came Sunday morning with a quiet
Breakfast. We thought to venture out once more
From Brooklyn, though the city still was fast
Asleep. We lingered over streets and ate
Two hot dogs each. We slipped out later from
The city in the dipping sun to drive
Back home to things that drove us out before.

But we told these things to our yearning friends:
Our stories were like myths for our own time,
And we like prophets for each burning truth.

a conversation over beer at main and laurel

2006-02-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

Would you come to Riesen with me?
Would you
follow?
Our desperate conversation begs you to
follow
and bring and join in fecund times
My beard and doleful eyes
The crop of my hair attracts you, I believe
Words uttered, then muttered
I highlighted them in the crossword
They sound unsure
but my ideas are developed
as much as the knowledgeable table of genial people behind us
My ideas demand you.

p.s. blogger sucks, it won't let me format this poem the way i want

The Cinematic Wish: Christian Metz and Singin' in the Rain

2005-12-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

In his essay “Identification, Mirror” from The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz talks about the cinema and its roots in the unconscious. He uses psychoanalysis to reveal three specific areas: mirror identification, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and fetishism. This essay will summarize Metz’s discussion of mirror identification, and relate it to the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain, a film which could easily serve the purpose of explaining any of Metz’s areas of discussion, but serves the area of mirror identification particularly well. This essay will briefly touch on the idea of disavowal, which Metz discusses alongside fetish, in relation to mirror identification.
When discussing mirror identification, Metz discusses cinema in terms of it being an imaginary signifier. That is, the perceptions which cinema conjures are absent. Metz begins with the observation that cinema, more than any other medium, involves the senses. It is “more perceptual...than any other means of expression” (Metz 820). But cinema reveals itself to be completely absent of the perceptions it creates. The person seen or the sound heard is nowhere to be found in the auditorium. It is greatly ironic, and, as Metz says, the source of cinema’s unique form of expression that it is endowed with “unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time [it is] stamped with unreality to an unusual degree, and from the very outset” (822). Not only is film an imaginary signifier, but it is a special kind of mirror, according to Metz. The visual (and aural) replicas it creates are similar to a mirror in all aspects, except that it lacks the subject, that is the viewer, who sees himself along with all the other objects in a mirror. It is, in fact, these other objects that allows the subject to define himself (that is, his ego if formed in relation to these objects), when the subject is in the mirror phase as defined by Freudian psychology. In the sense that the subject does not find himself an object in the film mirror, he becomes the “all-perceiving subject” because it is he who sees all, hears all. It is, in fact, by him that the film comes into reality, because it is his perceptions that interpret the lights thrown upon the screen and the air reverberations in the auditorium as understandable sights and sounds. The subject’s knowledge of what is happening around him makes film possible, according to Metz. Specifically, the subject knows that “I am perceiving something imaginary…and I know that it is I who am perceiving it” (Metz 823). The subject becomes the “second screen” where these images and sounds are deposited, “where this really perceived imaginary accedes to the symbolic by its inauguration as the signifier of a certain type of institutionalized social activity called ‘cinema’” (Metz 823). The subject is recognizing himself as part of the process of cinema, and thus identifying with himself in the cinema.
The viewer, however, is not only analogous to the screen. As the “all-perceiving subject,” they identify with the camera. Metz says that when the subject “identifies with himself as the look, the spectator can do no other than identify with the camera, too, which has looked before him at what he is now looking at and whose stationing ( = framing) determines the vanishing point” (824). The viewer becomes part of the apparatus of cinema, as both camera and screen. Metz explains this in terms of vision being a double movement, one that is both active and passive. It is active in that it “casts” it vision upon something, choosing to look in a particular direction, at a particular angle, etc, and it is passive in that it records the object (Metz 824). The mirror-like nature of the apparatus becomes a metaphor for the relationship between the viewer and signifier. Due in part to this mirror-like nature, the viewer unconsciously recognizes the absent nature of the signifier. The viewer knows that what he is seeing is only a recording, yet he chooses to understand it as reality within in the confines of cinema (he understands that it is a train he sees on screen—it is reality in this sense—but does not run away when the train comes directly at the screen—it is within the confines of cinema in this sense). This is disavowal: when the subject denies his perceptual belief in favor of a more primal belief (i.e., that he is seeing a train and thus he understands it as having all the qualities of a train). Metz goes on to explain that some “cinematic sub-codes inscribe disavowal into the film” (834). Singin’ in the Rain is just such a film.
Singin’ in the Rain is itself a movie within a movie within a movie. There are three separate levels to the film. One level is the movie The Singing Cavalier. The next level is about the making of The Singing Cavalier. The last level, suggested by the final shot of Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden standing in front of a billboard for Singin’ in the Rain, suggests the movie Singin’ in the Rain is actually a movie about the making of itself (Metz’s discussion of fetish would be very appropriate here, as the movie is obsessed with its own apparatus). And thus, it isn’t actually Don Lockwood and Kathy Seldon standing in front of the billboard, but Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. There are many other sub-levels within the movie (such as Lockwood’s retelling of his rise to fame, which itself is later echoed in another sequence), but these are the three primary levels. As the film transitions from level to level, the apparatus which creates each level is revealed. The audience becomes more and more aware of the mirror-like process of the apparatus they are apart of. The audience even becomes directly aware of themselves at particular points in the film.
One sequence in particular demonstrates the audiences’ unconscious self-awareness quite well. In it, Don Lockwood and Cosmo Brown pass by three separate sets, discussing their current film project and Lockwood’s own romantic distraction with Kathy Selden. This shot allows the viewer to see the making of three separate movies, all being filmed concurrently and immediately next to each other on the same soundstage. The viewer sees the film equipment used to capture the image; they see the director orchestrating the events; they see actors in partial costume off-set. This view of the actors in particular confirms the absent and imaginary nature of the signifier. Don and Cosmo speak with one actor (half dressed as an African native) who is off-set while his fellow actors dance wildly in full-garb in the background. Not only is this African native calmly sipping some hot drink, he is white! Surely the signifier that the potential viewers of this African native film perceive is revealed to the viewer as a patently false construct, the truest confirmation of the imaginary signifier. One other set in the background reveals a western drama being filmed, surely in one sense a tribute to bygone days. While the three main levels of the movie are a narrative discourse, this particular sequence of the film could indicate a fourth level, that of a political discourse, in its nod to the racial perceptions and idealizing tendencies of the 1950s. It could be said this fourth level addresses the audience in an indirect political manner that would later become direct in movies such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. As the sequence continues, Don and Cosmo discuss the originality of cinema (ironically, in front of the mill-like process in which Hollywood turns out entertainment). Cosmo states that “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all” and that the most important thing is to “make ‘em laugh.” This launches a musical sequence, in which Cosmo expounds on the importance of making the audience laugh, while accomplishing the very thing he’s singing about with his antics. This particular sequence continues to engage the audience on the fourth level of political discourse, questioning their own motivations in coming. It questions whether the signifier that makes them laugh is actually humorous, or simply manipulation. Through this political discourse with the audience and the constant revelation of the apparatus, the audience becomes aware of its own presence in the movie and its part of the apparatus. But this awareness is unconscious.
What makes Singin’ in the Rain so masterful is how effortlessly it moves from one level to the next, and yet still manages the draw in the audience while revealing to them their own place in the film. The viewer doesn’t even realize the discontinuity during Cosmo’s “make ‘em laugh” routine when Cosmo stops looking at Don Lockwood and turns directly to the audience, addressing them in the visual equivalent to the 2nd person, while speaking about them in the 3rd. It is like a magician who reveals how his trick is done, yet still amazes his audience. The viewer completely disavows everything he perceives that tells him he is watching a patent falsehood, unconsciously choosing rather to enjoy it for the cinematic reality he wishes to see. Thus, one can see that the cinema is like the unconscious wish Metz describes in his essay. And if cinema is driven by the unconscious desires and beliefs Metz describes, then the cinema truly becomes the art form of the wish.

Bibliography
Metz, Christian. “From The Imaginary Signifier: Identification, Mirror.” Film Theory and Criticism, Sixth Edition. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 820-836.

2005-10-27T18:22:00.000-07:00

I know I rarely update this blog, but I figure I can throw a paper up now and then for the general edification of this blog's small audience...enjoy my cinema 121 paper...

Bazin and Rules of the Game

André Bazin’s essay on the theater and cinema from What is Cinema? opens with a discussion of the concept of presence. Bazin is responding to those who despise filmed theater, explaining that the last argument left for the superiority of actual theater over filmed theater is the “‘the impossibility of separating off action and actor.’” (Bazin 418). The actual presence of the actor with the audience allows for the greatest impact of the play, and thus theater is the best medium for the text that was created by the playwright. Presence, as Bazin explains, is “defined in terms of time and space.” (Bazin 419) While the audience is absent from the actual actor, Bazin shows that there is a sense of time and space which is present with the actors in cinema. Cinema captures an object in the same manner photography does, but also, “makes a molding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes and imprint of the duration of the object.” (Bazin 419) Bazin goes on to make the case that the cinema is actually truer to the reality of space than theater; it is the one reality of which cinema cannot be deprived. Thus, in the cinema everything “takes place as if in the time-space perimeter which is the definition of presence.” (Bazin 420)
For Bazin, though, the question of theater versus cinema should focus on the terms “opposition” and “identification.” Bazin quotes Rosenkrantz:
“The characters on the screen are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real presence gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in an imaginary world the will of the spectator has to intervene actively, that is to say, to will to transform their physical reality into an abstraction.” (420)
Thus, the focus shifts from ontological to psychological. The viewer, psychologically isolated from his fellow audience, is passive, taking in whatever the cinema offers him. Such a state allows the viewer to identify with characters in the story. In the theater, however, the actor and the audience are both aware of each other. Such an awareness puts them in opposition to each other, and thus the viewer is not passive anymore; he does not identify with the characters on stage.

Bazin says that we, as viewers of cinema watch, as voyeurs, “through half open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the universe.” (422) The spectacle of cinema can exist without actors, and thus, the dramatic flow does not begin with man, as it does in the theater. In film, the dramatic flow of theater is reversed, beginning with décor and then moving to man. Thus, according to Bazin, a film should be as realistic in terms of décor as possible. He says “cinema is dedicated entirely to the representation if not of natural reality at least of a plausible reality of which the spectator admits the identity with nature as he knows it.” (Bazin 426) He gives as an example to support this thesis the failure of German expressionism. Thus, film, realistically portraying both time and space, but in a different mode than theater, doesn’t lack presence, but instead redefines the notion of presence. For a time, the viewer is drawn into the film, and the “film is the Universe.” (Bazin 426) To accomplish this, though, a film must achieve realism of space through accuracy of décor.
Jean Renoir’s classic masterpiece, The Rules of the Game is the perfect demonstration of Bazin’s ideas about film, particulalarly how the accuracy of décor affects the reality of space and thus, the effectiveness of the film. Rules of the Game itself is very theatrical, and it is ironic that it should be used to prove Bazin’s points in his essay comparing theater and cinema. Perhaps this is what makes Renoir’s film so interesting when coupled with Bazin’s ideas. It often uses theatrical framing and sets, but intersperses them with techniques unique to film (such as close ups and panning the camera) to make it effective. Renoir uses other techniques in addition to close ups and panning to keep the reality of décor such as deep focus, background actions, pacing, and the use of camera. The sequence of scenes during the party provide plenty of examples of Renoir’s craft and use of these techniques.
Renoir’s use of deep focus is the key to many of the other techniques that confirm reality of space, and it is also the primary confirmation to the viewer’s eye of the reality of space. Deep focus is closest to how the human eye sees, and thus, Renoir creates a visual that subconsciously confirms the realness of his story to the viewer. Additionally, deep focus does not seek to direct the viewer’s eyes. They are free to take in whatever they wish on the screen, be that the action in the foreground or the action which may be developing in the background.
The use of background action is another technique Renoir utilizes to confirm the reality of space, and his use of deep focus allows him to let the viewer explore these actions. Renoir uses it extensively during the party sequence, and it allows the multiple story lines to progress and weave together. One scene in particular to consider during the party sequence takes place in the foyer with the stairwell. Marceau, a house servant, asks his master Robert Chesnaye to cover for him while he escapes from the groundskeeper Schumacher, who is seeking revenge on Marceau for philandering with his wife. Robert intercepts Schumacher, who has been dragging his wife from room to room looking for Marceau, and informs him that he must stay out of the party area. While speaking, we see Marceau escape through a back door, and Schumacher’s wife quietly slips away to escape through the same backdoor. After Robert is called away, Schumacher, realizing his wife is gone, looks around desperately. While doing this, Andre Jurieu, who is in love with Chesnaye’s wife, Christine, enters and asks Schumacher if he has seen Christine. Schumacher says he has not and in the process of looking for his wife, opens a door to reveal Christine with Saint-Aubin, another party guest. Jurieu sees them and enters the room. This particular background action not only simply convinces the viewer that they are watching a realistic party scene (something theater could have a hard time accomplishing, due to lack of stage space), but also advances the story line. It is both décor and story. This is the beauty of film, that such action can be simultaneously part of the atmosphere, and concurrently advance the story.
This scene also demonstrates another technique of Renoir, namely, putting multiple events in one long, extended shot. This particular shot contains three events and allows them to proceed almost concurrently: Robert intercepting Schumacher, the escape of Marceau, and Jurieu’s discovery of Christine. In showing the events at almost concurrent moments, Renoir tells the story in a realistic manner. Instead of breaking the three events into three separate and differently framed shots, he is showing things as they progress in their true pacing. By layering these events in a single shot, Renoir is confirming the accuracy of décor, and thus, the reality of space. The extended shot, like deep focus, allows the viewer to absorb the story in the same way they would watch such events unfold in real life. This also confirms the accuracy of décor.
During extended shots Renoir does not always keep the camera stationary. Oftentimes, he moves it from room to room, as if the viewer is a silent observer, mingling amongst the party guests and studying the goings on. In addition to this, Renoir has the camera enter in the midst of action, as if it has been going on for some time while the camera was in another room. This is reminiscent of Bazin’s point about the conventions of theater which a theatergoer must accept. While theatergoers know the actor exits the stage and goes to his dressing room, they accept for the purpose of the story, that he actually goes some place else. In the world of film, however, the camera can follow the actor as they leave and go to that “some place” or enter on them later in that “place,” confirming that they were there the whole time. The character does not cease to exist in the mind of the viewer, rather they simply go out of view. This particular aspect of the reality of space is extremely important to Renoir’s films. The viewer must be convinced that while Christine and Jurieu are speaking in one room, Schumacher is still pursuing Marceau. The tension of that chase is still there for the viewer, even when the camera is not present to observe those actions.
Renoir does a supremely good job of creating a décor that is true to reality. It is almost as if he has simply turned the camera on, and the viewer becomes the silent observer described by Bazin in his essay. Renoir accomplishes this reality and sense of the film as a temporary universe through the techniques of deep focus, background action, and his use of camera. Rules of the Game is a masterpiece, orchestrated by a master filmmaker. This becomes perfectly clear when analyzed through Bazin’s critical lens

Priest

2005-09-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

A short story written for my creative writing class at Binghamton... the names in this story were only used because I'm completely unoriginal and unable to write any character unless they're named after someone i know...

Priest
Micah Towery

1.
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
~Coleridge

Oftentimes, Father Tom felt the cross around his neck weighing heavily. Usually during visits to the ER, or through marriage counseling, or when hearing confessions, it seemed to be an extra weight to him, pulling down on the nape of his neck, almost digging in, leaving its interlinking marks in red indentations.
Father Tom saw the faces through the matted confessional wall, knowing who they were, knowing the faces, but seemingly removed from their bodies. Only their souls made it through the confessional screen. And the souls he saw…
Sometimes, when lighting incense and candles, the smell burned in his nose. The large Bible he carried to the altar during mass felt like an unnecessary burden. And the faces he saw while processing down the center aisle, similar, but not identical to the ones he knew through the confessional screen, seemed to hang like they were strung from the ceiling.
The priest is the unmitigated carrier of burdens, Christ-like at times, single and dedicated solely to the work of God. In theory, the priest passes these burdens along to God, but his humanity inevitably gets in the way.

2.
As the priest got up to speak
The assembly craved relief
But he himself had given up
So instead he offered them this bitter cup
~Pedro the Lion

Father Tom, dressed in his cassock, spoke at the head of the casket that was suspended over the open mouth of the ground:

Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Martin.
Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you,
a sheep
of your own fold,
a lamb
of your own flock,
a sinner of your own redeeming.
Receive him into the
arms of your mercy,
into the blessed rest of everlasting peace,
and into the glorious company of saints in light.

The people responded: Amen.
Father Tom continued:

May his soul and the souls
of all the departed,
through the mercy of God,
rest in peace.

The people responded again: Amen.
After the body had been lowered into the ground, some parishioners were talking at the wake.
“Martin died of a broken heart. After Emily went, there wasn’t much he could do to stay alive.” The parishioner sighed, “the cancer just kept coming back.”
“Yes, I think Emily was the only thing that kept him alive, sometimes. He always talked about how he hated the way things changed. I think what angered him most were remote key chains. Remote controls for the TV were bad enough, but when people began using remote key chains to lock their cars, I think that’s when he decided it was time for him to go. He said, ‘Reaching around to unlock that rear passenger door is the only thing that keeps my shoulders rotating! Goddamn people can’t even bother to stand up and change the channel. They just flip, flip, flip, flip, flip all the time! And they wonder why they got such fat asses!’”
The parishioners suddenly noticed Father Tom was standing amongst them.
“Oh …Father…I was just quoting Martin. For, uh, accuracy’s sake…”
Father Tom smiled. He had always found it humorous when he walked in on parishioners doing something of which they thought he’d disapprove. Several times he found Brother John munching the communion wafers and sipping the wine before the service. One time he found the communion wine to be so low that he had to run across the street to the liquor store, collar and all, to buy the cheapest wine he could find. He barely had enough time to bless it before mass, and he pretended not to notice when Brother John kept praying to Peter, Paul, and Mary while humming “Puff the Magic Dragon.” “Martin usually said what was on his mind. I always liked that about him.”
The parishioners nodded in agreement. One spoke up, “Father, it doesn’t seem right that Martin should be stuck on this earth in that casket when he hated this place so much sometimes.”
“Well, the Bible says that in the end, our bodies will be resurrected from the ground: ‘The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them.’ The stone will be rolled away…again, so to speak. All these things will pass away. So, really, I don’t think Martin’s stuck here. And in the meantime, I’m sure he won’t mind.”

3.
When the sun was setting, all those who had any
that were sick with various diseases brought them to Him;
and He laid His hands on every one of them and healed them.
~Luke 4:40

Father Tom was the minister on call in the St. Mary’s Emergency Room when they brought Emily in. He held her hand and looked into her eyes as the gurney was rolled into hospital. The doctors administered morphine and told Martin it was only a matter of time. Martin spent a long time sitting by Emily’s bed, whispering things to her. Father Tom sat in a nearby chair, silently, holding one hand in the other.
When the doctors came in, it was Father Tom who spoke to them, not wanting to distract Martin from his last chance to speak with his wife.
“The cancer has grown so much that it’s begun to eat into several vital organs. We just looked at her last X-rays…” the doctor sighed, “someone should have put her in a hospice several months ago. I can only imagine the pain would have been incredible.”
“Emily hasn’t complained of anything,” Father Tom said.
“Sometimes, when a person knows they’re dying, they’re able to resist the pain if they think it’s better for their loved ones.”
After a few hours of sitting by her side, Martin got up. He began talking to Father Tom outside the room.
“I knew it was coming, but I just couldn’t accept it. I think she knew that too…” he sobbed.
Martin left for a few moments to call their children. Tom walked back into the room. He stood over Emily for a while, contemplating. Her breathing had been labored for a while now, and he had grown used to the wheezing sound. He wondered what it would take to make her well.
Martin and Emily had been members of the parish long before he was there. He was very fond of them both, and especially close to Martin. As the years passed by, Tom grew close to many of the parishioners, but he was drawn to Emily and Martin. He was a friend to them, but also their priest. He knew the pain Martin was feeling now. He understood that if Emily died, Martin would follow soon after.
Father Tom breathed in deeply, and laid his hand on Emily’s head. He gazed intently at the picture of Mary over the bed. He cycled through all the prayers he knew, desperately trying to fine one. He tried, and was unable to think of a single line. Instead, the only words that came out were “Please. Please…” His hand shook, sweat beaded on his forehead, but nothing happened.

4.
For those who do not yet believe, and for those who have lost their faith,
that they may receive the light of the Gospel, we pray to you, O Lord.
~Book of Prayer

Father Tom had just gotten off the phone with a man who was struggling with his faith. The man had lost his brother when he was younger in an accident.
“I just don’t understand, Father. He was pretty young, had a lot of potential. More than me, you know? And I just can’t believe that God would want us to suffer like I did.”
The man went on like this, while Father Tom listened. As he did, the cross around his neck, which was already heavy, began to feel heavier. It varied at times in weight. At times like this, though, it seemed unbearable to wear around his neck.
“Well, we have to have faith sometimes. I don’t know if I can explain why, but I do know at the times when I feel the most doubtful, or in the most pain, those are the times when I feel the most need to believe.”
When Tom got off the phone with the man, he closed the doors of the empty church behind him as he left, leaving it unlocked in case someone felt the need to stop in and pray. He walked down the sidewalk to the church parsonage next door, and opened the front gate. Coming inside, he took off the cross that hung around his neck and hung it on a nail in the door frame. He looked out the back window at the statue of Mary, wondering if one day she would speak to him.

I'm unable to resist...

2005-08-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

...this chance to blog from my cell phone again-the gadget temptation is too great. this post is completely unable to justify itself unless you value such family vacation gems like this one (see above) or stories of canucks driving along with gas caps hanging on the side (those silly canadians!) or cars bursting into flames as you pass. in other news i'll be moving to binghamton monday. from what josh tells me, my room is pretty sweet, complete with a huge closet and massive octagonal bay windows. so i'm purty durn excited. but i'm going to miss all my virginian friends :-\ ...and mia :-(

an actual post. a dash of poetry.

2005-08-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Wise fathers
Sharpen the axe
Wise mothers begin to unbox
Sweaters and jackets
Stitched wool
Because the children could not understand
(the heat makes them forget)
They will see their breath
Sooner than they think

A pix post?

2005-07-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

Ok...hope this works! This is Mia while we work on her hood and quarter panel...just a hint of what's to come :-)

e-mail test post...

2005-07-28T19:58:00.000-07:00

well, there are some pretty cool things you can do with blogspot that you can't do with xanga...then again...there are things i like about xanga i don't like about blogspot...so...i'll keep them both....and update whichever as i please (although probably my xanga out of habit...)

micah

p.s. next attempt...posting via text message...

should i actually post here?

2005-07-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

well...everyone seems to like blogspot...it is kinda cool, i admit...

my first blogger post...

2004-08-19T14:20:00.001-07:00

hey all...

i know a lot of people who have blogger sites, and use xanga to link to their other blogs...so i'm doing the opposite...

this is me pissing in blogger's back yard

check out my real blog on xanga... www.xanga.com/ottorinophc

micah